"...digital technology has not transformed consumer behavior at an elemental level. For all the savvy of youth and the broader awareness of the outside world, Chinese internet users' underlying conservatism is clear.
This book is in some ways very similar to the previously reviewed The End of Cheap China. Both the author of this book and the author that book are businessmen with a stake in China, both are (at least to some extent) Westerners, and both have written books for Western business interests. Author Shaun Rein operates a consulting firm, while Tom Doctoroff manages an advertising agency.
But thankfully that's where the similarities end, because where Shaun Rein wrote a more anecdotal, less objective account of China, Tom Doctoroff delivers a book simultaneously grounded in fact and sweeping in scope. In his analysis of Chinese consumers he delves deep into historical, political and cultural trends, all the while maintaining a laser-like focus on the modern Chinese character and how it influences spending habits both within and without China.
Beyond that there's not much else to say. More general readers will be put off by the first few chapters, which concentrate more on aspects of marketing to the Chinese consumer, but their perseverance will be rewarded by wider discussions Chinese society later on. The author does repeat himself a few too many times, but on the whole What Chinese Want is an excellent book, with a lot to say about its subject.
Related Entries:
"The End of Cheap China" by Shaun Rein (2012)
"Elite China" by Pierre Xiao Lu (2008)
"China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know" by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (2010)
"On China" by Henry Kissinger (2011)
"Being so far removed from the new collections and from the season cycle of the fashion industry, Chinese luxury consumers are not particularly sensitive to new fashion trends. The tardiness of the Chinese luxury market toward luxury innovations ensures that the curve maintains a very long period of maturity and declines very slowly, which means that some luxury models, outdated in the West, can still be sold in Chinese boutiques."
Pierre Xiao Lu is a Professor of Marketing at Shanghai's Fudan University. He's also a consultant to several luxury firms in China. I'm guessing he makes a lot of money as a consultant, and this money probably enables him to frequent many of the upscale fashion boutiques he describes in Elite China.
And... me? Do I buy my watches at Omega, and get fitted for suits and wherever-it-is-that-fashionable-people-get-fitted-for-suits? Have I ever set foot in a Shanghai Tang? Have I ever attended a fashion show? Have I ever flipped through an issue of Vogue? The answer to all these questions is "No," but hey, I have read all the books in Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians series, so there you go.
I'm obviously not part of the intended audience for this book. I'm not even remotely interested in the world of fashion, nor am I interested in a multinational partnership between my own, non-existent fashion brand and a Mainland Chinese firm. But I am interested in China, so this book was of some interest to me.
The more psychological chapters aside, I enjoyed the sections of this book discussing spending patterns in different parts of China. Since I'm only peripherally involved in that market (I live in Taiwan), I'm fairly ignorant when it comes to the differences between Beijing and Shanghai, Chengdu and Guangzhou, and Xiamen and Hong Kong.
The rest of the book? Fairly light reading. Mostly surveys and the interpretations thereof. Some lightweight psychologizing, and some over-generalizations about differences between East and West. The weakest part of this book (by far) is the historical synopses of different eras of Chinese history - some of which are just plain wrong. But hey, this book never pretends to be a work of history, and none of the historical details fudged in it are likely to be a source of embarrassment for outsiders.
If you're the Head of International Marketing for Tommy Hilfiger I recommend this book. If not, I'd just go read Crazy Rich Asians again. Kevin Kwan's book is both more entertaining and details more of the fashion trends that really shape people's lives. Elite China is for the elite, which is I suppose a mark in its favor.
Related Entries:
"China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know" by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (2010)
"On China" by Henry Kissinger (2011)
"American Sniper" by Chris Kyle (2012)
"How Google Works" by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg (2014)
"There are many factors that make it extremely unlikely that the PRC with use military force to try to achieve the long-held goal of "reunification," which remains a stated desire of both the CCP and the Nationalist Party but is not even an aim of the organizations with which the latter now has to share power in Taiwan. The CCP still clings to the idea that there is only "one China" (a notion that the political separation of Taiwan from the Mainland is a temporary aberration rather than a permanent state of affairs), but it is hard to see how it would end up acting to change reunification from a far-off dream to an immediate reality."
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He has written several books on the subject of modern China.
And if any book ever struck me as an impulse buy from someone's trip through an airport, this book is it. I can just see a man or women on their way to China for the first time, purchasing this in one of those tiny bookshops on the way to a departure gate. "It's really happening!" I can imagine them thinking, "I'm going to China! I need a book to help me get ready!"
Which is fine, I suppose. You've got to start somewhere, and China in the 21st Century is a decent place to start. Although it's more of a series of questions and answers than an actual book, with its goal being an enhanced understanding of US-China relations. It definitely completes the task it sets out for itself, and for this reason I would recommend it.
My only complaint is that the author occasionally uses some strange sentence structures. There were a couple places where I expected a sentence to continue on, but no, it just stopped where it was, dead in its tracks. This is, I suppose, another way of saying that the author's prose doesn't quite flow as well as it could, and that some of his word choices are questionable. This awkwardness of language doesn't occur often, but in a book this short it's very noticeable.
Just the same, if you're on your way to China for the first time I suggest picking this one up. I'm sure you'll see it in one of those bookshops, somewhere between here, there and Beijing.
Related Entries:
"On China" by Henry Kissinger (2011)
"American Sniper" by Chris Kyle (2012)
"How Google Works" by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg (2014)
"Misbehaving" by Richard H. Thaler (2015)
"Chinese adults today have lived through several swings of the ideological pendulum, including periods of repression. Their current adaptation does not necessarily signal support for the government. The high school and college graduates who are being sent to the countryside have an outlook different from that of Mao's Red Guards who preached learning from the people. The students who demonstrated in Tiananmen Square exhibited a cosmopolitanism that would have been impossible a decade earlier. Deng's open-door policy allowed Chinese access to the ideas of reformers as diverse as Thomas Jefferson and Mikhail Gorbachev. They see no need to learn from peasants or workers, and most likely their resentment will fester. If Deng's open-door policy continues, increased disparities in income and opportunity will be exacerbated and the disaffected will again emerge. The CCP might achieve Deng's goal of producing a "moderately" developed China by 2050, but the price may be the repression of much of its population."
At the time of publication, June Grasso was an Associate Professor of Social Science at Boston University. Her two coauthors also taught in the same place. This is the last book on China that any of them were involved with, and it seems to have made little impact beyond the college campuses where it was assigned reading.
As one would expect, this book begins with the sunset years of the Ching Dynasty in the late 19th century. From there it moves on to the Opium War, the treaty ports, the Republic of China, the Japanese incursions, the birth of the Chinese communist movement, the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War, and then concludes with China's decades-long transformation from totalitarian dictatorship to dictatorship softened by elements of a free market economy. It's a story familiar to anyone who's read any other book about modern China, and there is nothing surprising or especially insightful about the way in which the authors tell it.
And as with many such books, there is a gaping hole at its center. This gaping hole would be the lack of primary sources, and the fact that most of this book consists of observations and opinions regurgitated from other, more famous books. Despite Grasso's PhD in Modern Chinese History, not a single Chinese-language source is cited, and the bibliography can be, for the most part, reduced to a handful of works by better informed authors. Immanuel Hsu, for example, and his excellent The Rise of Modern China, or even Edgar Snow, whose Red Star Over China is sadly overlooked.
Taken on its own merits, Modernization and Revolution in China isn't terrible, it just lacks the scholarship and flair for the subject which make books like this much better.
"One of the jobs of a military is to plan for worst-case scenarios. The U.S. military conducts regular war games to test how conflicts with potential adversaries such as China might play out, and in recent years these have delivered some disturbing conclusions."
In "The Contest of the Century," author Geoff Dyer discusses the fast-changing nature of U.S.-China relations. From his vantage point as a foreign correspondent living in China, he outlines the development of crucial disparities between the two nations, and offers solutions for possible difficulties that may arise between them. At almost 300 pages, it's far from an exhaustive treatise on the subject, but it does raise some interesting points.
The first half of the book outlines the military situation. China finds itself in a headlong race to catch up with the U.S. navy, for a multitude of military and political reasons. Much of this section describes China's maritime claims and sphere of influence, and also how the U.S. might both adapt itself to China's military posture and continue to be a player in Asian politics.
The third fourth of this book is an exploration into China's political situation. China's view of history is discussed, as is its inferiority complex with regard to certain Western political achievements. China is a country that is desperately trying to expand its influence in other parts of the world, yet its non-interventionist stance is often at odds with this attempt. Recent conflicts in places such as Sudan, says the author, have only made this conflict of interest more obvious.
The last fourth of this book takes on the heady subject of economics. Globalization and China's attempt to push the renminbi as a global currency are outlined, as are the origins of U.S. dominance within international finance.
"The Contest of the Century" is a well-written, thoughtful book with a couple of huge holes in it. The first of these holes is about the size of Taiwan, while the second is about the size of Xinjiang. I fail to understand how one can attempt to map out the complex relationship between China and the United States in the absence of these two territories. Perhaps the author (or his editor) thought that including such material would have confused its intended audience. Yet omitting this discussion begs a number of very important questions.
I also have the feeling that the author's Chinese isn't quite up to the task he sets himself. On occasion his translations of common Chinese phrases is somewhat bizarre ("辛苦了!" becomes "Thanks for your suffering!"), and there are no Chinese-language works sited in the bibliography. This might seem a minor point, but I think the author's command of Mandarin is crucial to his understanding of China. An insufficient understanding of Chinese points to a filtering of the subject matter through Western sources, Western people, and the English language itself, and this may be the very same kind of bias which the author claims he is trying to avoid.
Overall I would recommend this book with a few reservations. It's an easy, often insightful read, but those who've read other, recent books on the subject may want to give it a miss.
