Author Oded Shenkar provides up-to-date information, specific details, and perspectives about the current and future ascension of China. It is and will affect us locally and globally. This book focuses on generalities and will be helpful to those who plan on doing business in China or want to learn more about the "macro" affects of the PRC's growing influence. Perhaps too obvious to state (again) is China's coming economic, political, and military role in our world. By now, this concept is cliche. Yet the question is relevant, and now, moreso than ever before. The "Chinese Century" largely focuses on the next 100 years. Surpassing the U.S. economically is predicted to happen within the next twenty years.

A British businessman with a background in accounting and auditing, Clissold joined up with an entrepreneur in the early 1990s and set out to buy shares of Chinese firms and to work to make them more profitable. Within two years, Clissold's venture owned shares in 20 Chinese businesses, with 25,000 employees among them, but the story really centers on Clissold's encounters with the nation's "institutionalized confusion." Firing entrenched middle managers became a protracted process that led to factory riots and employees using company funds to set up competing businesses; the anticorruption bureau demanded cash bribes before opening investigations. Clissold's narrative is somewhat aimless, slipping from one misadventure (taking American fund managers to a condom factory) to the next, and there's a certain amount of

too-easy humor derived from the exoticism of Chinese culture (e.g., the inevitable banquet where unusual body parts of rabbit and deer are served). Even in these passages, though, Clissold's fundamental respect for the Chinese culture is unmistakable, and the scenes where he leaves his office and interacts directly with the people can be quite vividly detailed. By the late '90s, millions of dollars poured into the companies yield disastrous results from an investment standpoint (and Clissold himself suffers a heart attack), but the Chinese economy as a whole hums ever more loudly. Crossover appeal of this title may be limited, but business readers are likely to be entertained.

A lively, fact-packed account of China's spectacular, 30-year transformation from economic shambles following Mao's Cultural Revolution to burgeoning market superpower, this book offers a torrent of statistics, case studies and anecdotes to tell a by now familiar but still worrisome story succinctly. Paid an average of 25 cents an hour, China's workers are not the world's cheapest, but no nation can match this "docile and capable industrial workforce, groomed by generations of government-enforced discipline," as veteran business reporter (and Chicago Mercantile trading firm founder) Fishman characterizes it. Since Mexican wages were (at the time) four times those of China, NAFTA's impact has been dwarfed by China's explosive growth (about 9.5% a year), and  corporations  and  entrepreneurs  operating in  China

have few worries about minimum wages, pensions, benefits, unions, antipollution laws or worker safety regulations. For the U.S., Fishman predicts more of what we're already seeing: deficits, declining wages and the squeezing of the middle class. His solutions (revitalize education, close the trade gap) are not original, but some of his statistics carry a jolt: since 1998, prices in the U.S. have risen 16%, but they've fallen in nearly every category where China is the top exporter; a pair of Levis bought at Wal-Mart costs less today, adjusted for inflation, than it did 20 years ago—though the company no longer makes clothes in China.

Trinidadian journalist-novelist Naipaul stresses that much has changed since his 1962 trip to India, which yielded his darkly pessimistic book India : A Wounded Civilization. In this kaleidoscopic, layered travelogue, he portrays "a country of a million little mutinies," reeling with "rage and revolt," as percolating ideas of freedom shake loose the old moral ethos rooted in caste and class. Despite what he terms regional, religious and sectarian excesses, Naipaul sees possibilities for regeneration in the new freedoms, yet this skewed essay is fraught with bewilderment and sorrow as he reels off a familiar litany of problems--terrible poverty, shoddy manufactured goods, ugly neo-modern architecture, etc.--and comes to terms with his own past: his ancestors were indentured servants of Indian descent. Most interesting here are the dozens of first-person stories by Indians themselves, ranging from a wealthy young stockbroker to anti-religionists to a publisher of women's magazines.

"No Full Stops in India" is a series of essays on India by the BBC's former South Asia correspondent, Mark Tully. In the essays, Tully examines how India is being changed by global forces - cultural and economic - which Tully sees as a new kind of imperialism. India seems to have moved from being subjected to "old-style" imperialism under the British to the new style with little if anything in between, as India's elite was and is very Westernised and out of tune with the needs of the vast majority of India's population. Tully examines various aspects of Indian life to test out his thesis, ranging from a short biography of his servant Ram Chander, to the Kumbh Mela, the television version of the Ramayana, and (most disturbing and compelling) a sati in Rajasthan. All the pieces are well written. Tully takes time to relate small details of his travels and encounters which bring the book alive - the journey into rural India with Jangarh Singh Shyam in an old taxi for example.

Mark Tully, the former BBC bureau chief in Delhi, creates a colorful portrait of life in the state of Uttar Predesh, the "heart of India." Listeners hear stories about the problems of village life, such as having a reputation for being a barren wife, arranging a revenge killing, coping with a lazy husband, new attitudes about marriage, and religious festivals. These stories describe in personal terms a people being pushed headlong into the modern world. These are Mark Tully's own stories, and he reads them with authority and compassion. These stories help a Westerner better understand the unique atmosphere and vibrant culture of village India.

Das, an Indian venture capitalist and columnist for the Times of India (and former CEO of Procter & Gamble India), uses his own experiences as a businessman as the context in which to comment on India's postcolonial economic policies. He begins with Nehru's mixed economy (which he argues achieved democracy but ignored entrepreneurship and competition, resulting in an absence of industrial development) and continues through to the economic reforms of 1991 under Prime Minister Narasimha Rao (whom he labels a "reluctant liberalizer"), demonstrating how India has abandoned state-directed industrialization and finally become a free-market democracy with a burgeoning middle class. He also points out how India's late (and incomplete) entry into the international economy continues to hamper  its growth,  as

compared to other late entries, such as that of China, which had a lower per capita income than India did in the mid-'60s and today boasts one twice as large as India's. Nevertheless, Das remains optimistic that "the new India is increasingly one of competition and decentralization," particularly because of the Internet and the boom in software entrepreneurship. In explaining India's economic policies, he gives much credence to theories about high-caste Brahmins being averse to making money and the government's fears that capitalism would crush the poor; but Das only mentions in passing Russia's ideological sway at the time of India's independence and does not discuss the Cold War or the context for India's belief that import substitution was necessary to make India less dependent on the outside world for its survival. Business readers with an interest in Third World development will learn much from Das.

In a highly readable work of sound scholarship, Fairbank (a general editor of The Cambridge History of China and author of more than 20 books on China) undertakes the daunting task of integrating pre- and post revolutionary China in a historical overview. Tracing the origins of the Communist revolution of 1949 back to the late imperial era, he claims that the roots of this triumph of Marxist ideology go deep into Chinese tradition and convincingly relegates Western influence to the periphery. He proceeds to an expert analysis of the Manchu dynasty, the warlords (who found both their ultimate expression and death knell in Chiang Kai-shek), Mao's creation of a new state and China under Deng Xiaoping. Insightful and informative, this excellent synthesis of the forces that shaped contemporary China should be basic reading for anyone interested in understanding what the author calls "a largely unknown country seen from a great distance."