Conventional wisdom holds that China's burgeoning economic power has reduced the United States to little more than a customer and borrower of Beijing. The rise of China, many feel, necessarily means the decline of the West - the United States in particular.
Not so, writes Edward
Steinfeld. If anything, China's economic emergence is good for America. In this fascinating new book, Steinfeld asserts that China's growth is fortifying American commercial supremacy, because (as the title says) China is playing our game. By seeking to realize its dream of modernization by
integrating itself into the Western economic order, China is playing by our rules, reinforcing the dominance of our companies and regulatory institutions. The impact of the outside world has been largely beneficial to China's development, but also enormously disruptive. China has in many ways
handed over - outsourced - the remaking of its domestic economy and domestic institutions to foreign companies and foreign rule-making authorities. For Chinese companies now, participation in global production also means obedience to foreign rules. At the same time, even as these companies
assemble products for export to the West, the most valuable components for those products come from the West. America's share of global manufacturing, by value, has actually increased since 1990. Within China, the R&D centers established by Western companies attract the country's best scientists and
engineers, and harness that talent to global, rather than indigenous Chinese, innovation efforts. In many ways, both Chinese and American society are benefiting as a result. That said, the pressures on China are intense. China is modeling its economy on the United States, with vast consequences in
a country with a small fraction of America's per-capita income and scarcely any social safety net. Walmartization is not something that Asian manufacturing power is doing to us; rather, it is how we are transforming China.
From outsourcing to energy, Steinfeld overturns the conventional
wisdom in this incisive and richly researched account.
Part I. The New Competitor -- What Globalization Really Means for China
1. China's Rising Technology Giants
2. The Real Meaning of nullMade in Chinanull
3. Fee-for-Service Socialism and the nullWalmartizationnull of China
Part II. Outsourcing nullChinese
Stylenull
4. Institutional Outsourcing
5. Institutional Outsourcing on the Financial Front
6. IPOs and the Outsourcing of Control over nullNational Championsnull
Part III. Stretching the Bounds of Sustainability
7. China's Energy Sector - Who is Really Calling the
Shots?
8. Going Global on the Energy Front
9. Coping with Climate Change: Build It and They Will Come Part.
Part IV. Conclusions
10. Playing Our Game Now and for the Future
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Edward Steinfeld is Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT, and Director of the MIT-China program. He is the author of Forging Reform in China: The Fate of State-Owned Industry.
