The chhina puzzle

 CONTENTS  

1. The China pulzzle 

2.Chin's Economic Miracle

3.China's Cosumers and the new Generation

4.Paradise and jungle, the story of chinese Frims 

5.The State and the mayor Eocnomy

6.The Financial System

7.The Technology Race

8.China's Role in Global Trade

9.On the world's Financial Stage

10.Toward a new Paradigm

THE CHINA PUZZLE

This book is about reading china in the original, coming to understand its people , economy, and government in such way that the truth is not lost in translation, is far too often the case. I first reakuzed  this fresh perspecive was sorely needed way back in 1997 , when, as a teenager, I came to the US as a Chinese exchange student.

Dr. Lawrence Weiss, visionary headnaster of the Horace Mann School's upper division, in New York City , anticipated China's future signigicance in the world, despite its much smaller eeconomic and political hefl at that time. He believed it was important to introduce an anthentically Chinese perspective to the school's intellectual and social life. I was selected to help fill those gaps, eager in return to learn from the America that so impressed all of us back home.

Haveing parachuted in from a geographically and ideologically far-flung land, I seemd exotic to my classmates . Outside of school, anytime  i mentioned that i was from mainland China , a blizzard of questions followed .When will China become a democracy? Do you feel oppressed ? How do you wake up in the morning knwing that you can't elect your own prsident ? when will Chinese economy stop grwing ? I was fortunate enough to live with a hospitable America host family who brought me directly into America political life . Fresh from Communist China , I plunged straight into democratic campains for high office in New York State, handing out leaflets and attending fundraisers. I met lots of well-informed, politically savvy people, but they surprised me by posing the same questions as my fellow stuents . It was becomming clear to me that even sophisticated Americans possessed only a simplistic understanding of life in China . Between the lines I sensed sympathy for my having grown up in what seemd to them a backward country , wtih limited freedom of expressions or political choice.

 But the China they imagined was far from the one that I knew from my everyday life there-not to mention that by 1997  seismic shifts were already under way in my home country. People's excitement and hopes were bubbling over as we debated the value of new eocnomic reforms , our bid to host the Olympics, joining the world Trade Organization, privatizing state-owned companies , and adoping the technology of the west_including its cars, infrastructure,and bsuiness models. In school, our Chinese political science textbooks were in a constant state of revison, as Marxist thought gradually morphed into " socialsim with Chinese characteristics" People in China were living more comfortably tha they had in many generations. and every summer when I went back to Beijing during my yerss as an undergraduate , and later as a graduate student at harvard, the city's skline astonished me with its latest transformation.

Fast-forward nearly three decaded to the present . Today the backward homeland of my childood has become the world's second-largest economy, its massive new cities animated by astonishing technological wonders. Yet so much of the world is still asking the same questions, and still comparing China to former Commnist couuntries with their autocratic and reprssive regimes. Even when it comes to China's juggernaut economy, the world remains skeptical: China's economic model is running out of steam; the state is suppressing private entrepreneurs and stifling innovation; financail implosion loos on the horizon. However , in 2008 it was the US  financial system that drove off a cliff, dragging with it a formdable array of Euripean financail institutions and corporate giants . When so many other significant players in the global conomy fell into the recession that followed , it was no longer clear that a one-size-fits-all economic system like conventional Western capitalism was necessarily destined to prevail.

Many people toda still hold the deep-seated conviction that china's present course will end in disaster unless it converges with Western values, eocnomic systems, and political persuasions; some of those who hold a more positive view of china's economic accomplishments also tend to see china as a threat. As an economist who grew up there but also works in the West_with one foot in each world, as it were-I Believe neither of these perspective acccuraely reflects what is truly going on china .This book proposes an alternative view: more nuanced, more complex, and ,hopefully ,more helpfull.