In the Jaws of the Dragon - by Eamonn Fingleton (Paperback)

About the Book

Long-time Asia scholar and economist Fingleton sounds an alarming wake-up call to those who dream that through free-market capitalism, China will embrace American values and welcome U.S. firms.

Book Synopsis

In recent years, popular wisdom has held that opening American markets to Chinese goods was the best way to promote democracy in Beijing--that the Communist Party's grip would quickly weaken as increasingly affluent Chinese citizens embraced American values. That popular wisdom was wrong. As Eamonn Fingleton shows in this devastating book, the culmination of twenty years of research and study, instead of America changing China--i.e., making China more democratic--China is changing America.

While the Chinese people's rising affluence is, of course, an occasion for wholehearted rejoicing, Uncle Sam should give the Chinese power system a wide berth--lest he catch his coattails in the jaws of a dragon.

Review Quotes

"America's fate looks dicey in the showdown with the Chinese juggernaut, warns this vigorous jeremiad. . . . his economic analysis is incisive." --Publishers Weekly

"One of the most powerful, shocking, well-written, solidly documented, tear-the-scales-from-your-eyes books I've read in more than two decades. . . . I couldn't put this book down--at least 100 of its 310 pages are dog-eared and highlighted. It's probably the most important book that's ever been written about the future of our republic." --Thom Hartmann

"Eamonn Fingleton demonstrates once again why his analyses of modern capitalism deserve serious attention. He lays out the consequences of seeing China the way outsiders would like it to be, rather than the way it is." --James Fallows, The Atlantic Monthly

"Eamonn Fingleton's riveting and provocative book is required reading for anyone who cares about the U.S.-China relationship." --Senator Byron L. Dorgan, author of the New York Times bestseller Take This Job and Ship It

About the Author

Eamonn Fingleton, a prescient former editor for Forbes and the Financial Times, has been monitoring East Asian economics since he met supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in 1986 as a member of a top U.S. financial delegation. The following year he predicted the Tokyo banking crash and went on in Blindside, a controversial 1995 analysis that was praised by J. K. Galbraith and Bill Clinton, to show that a heedless America was fast losing its formerly vaunted dominance in advanced manufacturing to Japan. His book In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity brilliantly anticipated the Internet stock crash of 2000. His books have been read into the U.S. Senate record and named among the ten best business books of the year by Business Week