 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
China, Inc
Ted C. Fishman
Scribner, $34.95
 Everything's coming up China these days, whether the milestone Australian trade negotiations, the possibility of military conflict over Taiwan or the knowledge that just about everything we wear is manufactured in the most populous nation on Earth.
Well-published US commentator, Ted C. Fishman, has timed his book to perfection, posing the multi-billion dollar question of what happens when China can make nearly everything the West can at one-third of the cost?
Already, Chinese industry has mastered a wide range of products, and not just those convincing brand-label fakes that can be bought throughout Asia for a fraction of the cost of the genuine article.
'The nation is making parts for Boeing 757s and exploring space with its own domestically built rockets,' Fishman explains. 'China is buying oil fields internationally... China is buying the world's scrap metal... The country is relentlessly positioning itself for ever-higher levels of industrialisation... It's where the world is investing.'
This is not because China has the cheapest workforce in the world but because the workers are disciplined, increasingly better trained and operate under a stable political system - at least for now.
Moreover, the country where one-fifth of humanity lives is also viewed as the 'biggest market ever', not only capturing the attention of global players like Nokia, Disney and Microsoft but of Australian exporters, assuming our government can negotiate access to the lucrative Chinese market.
Fishman's tour of the copyright-infringement scene that so angers the West's prestige designers is fascinating, and for him, the impressive tip of an iceberg: 'Add up all the Longines, Rolexes... and many other brands, and the task to run a watch company so that it stays current seems to take the skills not unlike those needed to build artificial hearts, corneal implants, and precision parts for satellites'.
A major, and legal, challenge is expected to come in perhaps five years when China can make quality automobiles at prices two-thirds less than those charged by their Japanese or Korean competitors - countries that themselves were laughed at for making cars not so long ago.
'China's highways look better than Germany's autobahns. Especially at night,' the author observes, explaining that 'Old-fashioned public goods' such as roads, water and energy are being urgently privatised. The result is that 'China and her cities owe their progress and pollution to the wealth spinning out of the nation's greatest common resource: the very land that the Communists sacrificed a million lives to 'liberate' from private ownership.'
- Books reviewed are available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore.
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