The Myth of Chinese Capitalism
The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World
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- € 12,99
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- € 12,99
Beschrijving uitgever
The untold story of how restrictive policies are preventing China from becoming the world’s largest economy
Dexter Roberts lived in Beijing for two decades working as a reporter on economics, business and politics for Bloomberg Businessweek. In The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, Roberts explores the reality behind today’s financially-ascendant China and pulls the curtain back on how the Chinese manufacturing machine is actually powered.
He focuses on two places: the village of Binghuacun in the province of Guizhou, one of China’s poorest regions that sends the highest proportion of its youth away to become migrants; and Dongguan, China’s most infamous factory town located in Guangdong, home to both the largest number of migrant workers and the country’s biggest manufacturing base. Within these two towns and the people that move between them, Roberts focuses on the story of the Mo family, former farmers-turned-migrant-workers who are struggling to make a living in a fast-changing country that relegates one-half of its people to second-class status via household registration, land tenure policies and inequality in education and health care systems.
In The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, Dexter Roberts brings to life the problems that China and its people face today as they attempt to overcome a divisive system that poses a serious challenge to the country’s future development. In so doing, Roberts paints a boot-on-the-ground cautionary picture of China for a world now held in its financial thrall.
Dexter Roberts is an award-winning journalist and a regular commentator on the U.S.-China trade and political relationship. His prior speaking engagements include traditional news media outlets (NPR, Fox News, CNN International) as well as universities and institutes (George Washington University, Council on Foreign Relations, and the Overseas Press Club).
He is available for virtual classroom visits to courses that adopt The Myth of Chinese Capitalism. Please contact academic@macmillan.com for more information.
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Journalist Roberts blends economic analysis with human-interest reporting in this probing and accessible examination of the current state of the Chinese economy. Profiling migrant workers from the impoverished southwestern province of Guizhou, Roberts illustrates the hardships faced by hundreds of millions of rural Chinese who left home for factory jobs in coastal cities over the past two decades. Tight controls over the residence permit system that confers education, housing, legal, and social service benefits made these migrant workers second-class citizens in factory cities such as Dongguan, Roberts explains, though many were willing to accept "meager wages and poor working conditions" in exchange for the promise of material prosperity. The Communist Party's "bargain of continued economic growth in return for political acquiescence" is under threat, however, as large-scale shifts in labor and export markets, wrongheaded developmental policies, and President Xi Jinping's "sweeping crackdown on civil society" have pushed these workers' resentments to unstable levels. Roberts carefully documents growing unrest over unpaid wages and "arbitrary" government land seizures and writes movingly of factory workers and rural villagers struggling with the disconnect between what they were promised and what they've been able to achieve. The result is a clearheaded and persuasive counter-narrative to the notion that the Chinese economic model is set to take over the world. Readers looking for an informed and nuanced perspective on modern China will find it here.