Volume 52, Number 19 · December 1, 2005
The Chinese Shadow: II
By Robert Skidelsky
Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East
by Clyde Prestowitz
Basic Books, 321 pp., $26.95
China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World
by Ted C. Fishman
Scribner, 342 pp., $26.00
China's Urban Transition
by John Friedmann
University of Minnesota Press, 168 pp., $56.95; $18.95 (paper)
Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace
by Pun Ngai
Duke University Press/Hong Kong University Press,227 pp., $79.95; $22.95 (paper)
The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future
by Elizabeth C. Economy
Council on Foreign Relations/Cornell University Press,337 pp., $17.95 (paper)
Three superb recent books by John Friedmann, Pun Ngai, and Elizabeth C. Economy explore the effect of China's economic 'rise,' not on the United States but on China.[1] John Friedmann's China's Urban Transition looks at it through the lens of urbanization. Mao Zedong was anti-city, partly for military reasons: industries were to be dispersed into western mountains and caves, provinces were to be self-sufficient. The population was divided into a privileged urban minority (17 percent) and an exploited rural majority (83 percent). The Maoist city was seen as a production, not a consumption, unit, with workers coralled into factory barracks. The flow of rural labor to cities was tightly controlled; indeed in the decade of the Cultural Revolution millions of 'decadent' urbanites were forcibly sent to the countryside. The one-child-per-family policy, originally introduced in cities, held in check the urban population.
Review, 5223 words
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