THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, COMMUNITY, AND VALUES
by Jeffrey Barlow <barlowj@pacificu.edu>
about
Fast Boat to China. Lessons from Shanghai.
Andrew Ross
New York: Pantheon Books, 2006.
Fast Boat to China was a pleasure to read, and to review. It is one of a number of recent works by authors who, while not trained as Sinologists, are both authoritative witnesses to Chinese events and experts in their own academic field. [1] Andrew Ross is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Metropolitan Studies Program at New York University. [2]
Despite its Sino-centric title, the book is really a broader study into the politics and economics of globalization, particularly of "off-shoring," the sending of jobs from one country to another. However, like many students of China, Ross was so engaged by it that the work winds up being truly a recent history of the high-tech industry in both China and Taiwan. Indian entrepreneurs too, make their entrance periodically.
The work is fascinating in its detail. Ross lived in Shanghai for over a year and conducted hundreds of interviews ranging from American ex-patriate executives to Chinese and Taiwanese engineers in high-tech firms in coastal and inland China, as well as in Taiwan. We are given succinct summaries of the growth of the industry in many local regions of China.
Ross, however, continually has his eye on a much bigger picture. He sees these local events as the consequence of far larger decisions taken at the national level in Beijing, Taipei, and Washington, D.C. He is particularly adroit at explaining the underlying economic issues which invariably explain the outcomes of various conflicts between Chinese factories and American politicians. The national policy level in the U.S. comes to seem a sort of twenty-first century Beijing Opera in which politicians decry and declaim while business groups play the tunes from behind the curtain.
Perhaps the major value of the book is that Ross shows us that rather than being a win-lose game between American and Chinese workers for jobs, including now not only white collar but also high-end professional positions, both groups are equally impacted. Both now work in an environment in which their jobs are assumed to be fully portable, and their skills replaceable at lower cost at any moment. Because, however, they are shaped by different cultures, the American, Chinese, Indian, and Taiwanese engineers all make quite different responses to these facts.
And neither, Ross suggests, are the international corporations necessarily the uncontested winner in this contest. In some senses, they too are losers. Not all of the relocated positions turn out to be cost effective as productivity is almost inevitably markedly lower at the new site, and worker loyalty far lower. The new worker knows full well where his or her job came from, and realizes that it will inevitably move on to yet another man or woman in another region or another country. This process the author refers to as "labor arbitrage."
Ross writes from a very particular perspective. He is far from a free market economist---at one point he writes of the "addled minds" of the free marketers. He refers here to the mindset that wants to see the triumph (or at least the coming, inevitable triumph) of free market capitalism in China. Ross makes a convincing case that the Chinese success in building a highly competitive---if not dominant---high tech industry is in fact a result of government planning. Both national and local Chinese governments have skillfully manipulated investment, employment, tax, labor, pollution, and land use policies to attract the industry and to nurture it.
Ross is rather an advocate of what he calls "alternative globalization," a globalization guided by the interests of workers, citizens, and the environment rather than solely by corporate profits. From this perspective, he sees China as even more of a challenge than highly corporatized Western governments. The Chinese, while successfully wooing investors, have made sure that labor unions have no place in their particular industrial future. And Chinese workers are culturally so distinctive that not even Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese are capable of joint discussion, let alone action, though both are citizens of greater China.
However, though Ross has his point of view, the work is never strident nor does it really advocate any particular changes. Rather, it is an honest and overwhelmingly successful attempt to see the Chinese high-tech industry for what it is. If the book has faults, it is perhaps its overwhelming detail and the relative absences of conclusions. It is essentially an effective combination of scholarly and journalistic methodologies applied to understanding a very important contemporary problem, but understood within a specific national context, China.
Fast Boat to China is not a how-to-succeed-in-doing-business-in-China sort of book. But it should be read by anyone contemplating jobs being moved to China, whether the job is theirs at present, or the factory where the job now is performed. It also should be of interest to anyone who wants to get beyond the screen of stereotyped name-calling that often serves as the dominant conversation in the frequent clashes between Chinese and American interests.
Notes
[1] This is not to say that only such dual-qualified authors can produce worthwhile books. Among other useful books we have reviewed are Fishman, Ted C. China Inc., New York: Scribner, 2005. reviewed at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2005/04/fishman.php and Sheff, David. China Dawn. The Story of A Technology and Business Revolution. New York: Harper Business, 2002.which we reviewed at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2002/10/sheff.php Both works offer valuable insight, though neither Scheff nor Fishman have the breadth of expertise that Ross brings to this work.
[2] See his academic home page at: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/amerstu/ross.html Among his publications are: Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor (New Press, 2004); No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs (Basic Books, 2003) (Beijing, 2004) Paperback edition, Temple University Press, 2004.; The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town (New York: Ballantine, 1999) (London, Verso, 2000: Rome, Arcana Libri, 2002); Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice (NYU Press, 1998); The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society (Verso, 1994); Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (Verso, 1991, Sao Paolo, 1994); No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (Routledge, 1989), and many others.
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