Results for “china book”
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Michael Pettis, *Avoiding the Fall*, and China’s economic growth

Last night I read the new and excellent Michael Pettis book Avoiding the Fall: China’s Economic Restructuring.  It is the single best treatment I know for understanding the dilemmas of the current Chinese economy and the need for restructuring.  My favorite bits are those comparing the current Chinese economy to the Brazilian growth of the 1960s and 70s, also investment-driven, and lasting longer than most people thought possible, and culminating in the crack-up of the 1980s, which turned out to be a lost decade for Brazil.

By the way, China’s economy continues to defy the China skeptics (a group which includes me):

China’s economy expanded 7.8 per cent in the third quarter from the same period a year earlier, marking an acceleration from the second quarter when it grew by 7.5 per cent.

The rebound in the world’s second-largest economy was largely the result of government efforts to shore up growth with looser monetary policy and a “mini-stimulus” of investment in infrastructure such as rail and subway systems.

The full FT article is here.  As Pettis stresses, such developments are likely to intensify the eventual “discontinuity,” but of course the China skeptics have not yet been proven right…

Book and movie splat

1. Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter.  From my colleague at GMU Law, I have not yet read this one.

2. Damien Ma and William Adams, In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade.  How often does a book have both a good title and subtitle these days?  The authors are more pessimistic about China long-term than I am, but nonetheless this is a very interesting take on The Middle Kingdom.

3. Clare Jacobson, New Museums in China.  Good text but mostly a picture book, I loved this one.  Stunning architecture, no art, full of lessons in multiple areas, think of it as a Straussian picture book with beauty on its side too.

4. John Durant, The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health.  A useful overview of its topic, with an influence from Art DeVany, but you will not find recipes for either “grubs” nor “worms” here.

5. John Sides and Lynn Vavreck, The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election.  Good, sane tome on how the fundamentals matter and lots of campaigning ends up being cancelled out by the campaign of the other candidate.

From another direction, In a World… is a subtle and entertaining movie with much economics in it, most of all the economics of superstars in the “voiceover” sector.  The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceacescu is mesmerizing, like watching one of the great silent films of the past, and the scenes where the Chinese communists praise the Romanian communists are some of the best ever filmed.

The airline culture that is China

This undated photo shows two Xiamen Airlines stewardesses kneel in prayer at a shrine dedicated to being “on time”.

shrine

Here is more.  By the way, this is part of the problem:

The latest statistics shows that the flow of air traffic accounts for as high as 40 percent of the total number of flight delays during the first half of this year. And whether the flight could take off in time or not, it depends on the fellowship with the air traffic controller.

Captain Wang Hai said that as long as one crew member on a flight personally knows the air traffic controller, the flight would be given priority to take off in time.

But some air traffic controllers explain that queue-jumping contributes to flights unpunctuality.

“International flights and those carrying important passengers, such as government officials, business tycoons and senior officials in civil aviation, do not have to wait in long queues to take off”, an air traffic controller in south China’s Guangzhou said.

Here is related coverage from The Economist, excerpt:

The first and oldest problem is that China’s armed forces control most of the nation’s airspace—perhaps 70-80% of it. This is especially the case above and around cities, leaving very narrow corridors for aeroplanes to take off, land and navigate nasty weather.

I will once again recommend to you the James Fallows book on aviation in China.

For the pointer I thank D.

Thailand book bleg

From Chris Acree:

I’m planning a trip which will take me through Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. I recently began selecting a few books about each country to read to cover the history, culture, or other interesting aspects of the area. In particular, my favorite books in this vein are Country Driving and China Airborne, both about China.

However, in searching, I’ve found Cambodia has plenty of literature (Cambodia’s Curse by Pulitzer winner Joel Brinkley seems a good starting point), and Vietnam has at least a couple good books (I picked up Vietnam: Rising Dragon at your recommendation), whereas Thailand seems bereft of strong English-language histories or non-guide travel books. Amazon searches return almost exclusively books targeted towards sex tourists, and the Economist article here http://www.economist.com/node/16155881 is mostly over 10 years old. Kindle availability is also unavailable for most of their selections, which, while not a necessity for me, hints at books that aren’t aging well or being actively updated.

Has no reputable author written a great Thai travel book in the last 10 years? If not, why not? What books would you recommend on Thailand?

How about this biography of Bhumibol AdulyadejFalcon of Siam is historical fiction of note.  Thailand — Culture Smart! is good for browsing.  You can read a variety of books on Jim Thompson, and speaking of Thompson this cookbook by David Thompson is a must.  Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is one of the best movies ever made; watch these too, noting that Syndromes and a Century offers insight into the Thai health care system.  I am not recommending use of such services, but perhaps the best of the books for sex tourists are interesting too?  Siamese Soul is a good retro collection of Thai popular music from the 1960s through 1980s, hard on some ears but I like it.

Here is where Amazon sends you.  Here is where Lonely Planet sends you.  While you’re at it, why not read about Skyping with elephants in Thailand, in the service of science of course.

People, what else do you recommend?

My favorite non-fiction books of 2012

Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.

Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

David Hackett Fischer, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States.

George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe.

Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.

Michael Dirda, On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling.

James Fallows, China Airborne.

Greg Woolf, Rome: An Empire’s Story.

Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750.

Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography.

Barry Eichengreen, Dwight H. Perkins, and Khanho Shin, From Miracle to Maturity: The Growth of the Korean Economy.

I am sure I missed some, even of my own favorites!

My favorite things China

1. Novel: Soul Mountain, by Gao Xingjian.  Parts of Dream of the Red Chamber are splendid, but it is hard to keep track of the whole thing and also I wonder whether any of the available editions in English are satisfactory.

2. Movie: The Story of Qiu Ju.  A real charmer.

3. Comedian: Jackie Chan.

4. Movie, set in, but not a Chinese movie: How about TranssiberianShanghai Noon?  Are any of those old movies set in China any good?

5. Book, non-fiction: James Fallows, China Airborne.  I am also a fan of the book where the guy drives a car around China.  The Private Life of Chairman Mao is a stunner, maybe the best book I know on tyranny.

6. Book, set in, fiction (not by Chinese author): Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China.  Pearl Buck I find boring.

7. Sculpture: Tang horses, some images are here.

8. Contemporary Chinese artist: Cai Guo-Qiang, images here.  His one man show at the Guggenheim is one of the best exhibitions I’ve ever seen.  Try this video, apologies for the ad at the beginning.

9. Chinese traditional music: I am interested in Chinese opera, but don’t quite feel I’ve heard the real thing.  I once heard an electrified performance, but my sense is the music is all about the timbre and needs to be heard in an nowadays-almost-impossible-to-achieve setting, given that I am not a 17th century Chinese noble.  Any advice?  By the way, here is a good article on recent developments in Chinese (semi-classical) music.

10. Cookbooks: Fuchsia Dunlop’s two Chinese cookbooks are not only two of the best cookbooks ever they are two of the best books ever.

11. Best book about Chinese fiction: Sabina Knight, Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction.  This short book is a marvel of economy, substance, and style.

12. Pianist: Yundi Li, try this video of Chopin’s 2nd Scherzo.

13. Architect: I.M. Pei.  We have friends who live in a Pei-designed house, and it is splendid.

14. Movie director: John Woo was born in China.  The Killer might be his best movie, but Once a Thief is arguably the most underrated.  WindTalkers is quite good too and also underrated.

I am not counting either Hong Kong or Taiwan for these categories.  I also am not counting American-born, ethnic Chinese, such as Maya Lin.  And J.G. Ballard was born in Shanghai, but what category do I put him in?

Matthew Bishop’s new book

With Michael Green, In Gold We Trust: The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty, Kindle Single.  Here is a short video about the book.

From the authors:

It provides a lively analysis of the big economic questions currently facing America, such as the danger to the dollar posed by gridlock in DC, especially over deficit reduction, the euro crisis, the growing risk of inflation and the changing attitude of China towards America. We argue that the renaissance of gold, plus the development of virtual currencies such as Bitcoin, reflect weaknesses in the technology of money that we all need to take seriously and try to fix.

The Secret Agreement that Revolutionized China

In our principles textbook, Modern Principles: Macroeconomics, Tyler and I illustrate the importance of property rights with the incentive effects of collective farming and the secret agreement of Xiaogang village. We write:

http://www.chinatoday.com.cn/ctenglish/se/download/site127/20090710/00142ad54b730bc0ee3d02.jpeg
Farmers from 18 households in Xiaogang signed a secret life-and-death agreement ending collective farming with their thumbprints. (From Cowen and Tabarrok, Modern Principles: Macroeconomics)

The Great Leap Forward was a great leap backward – agricultural land was less productive in 1978 than it had been in 1949 when the communists took over.  In 1978, however, farmers in the village of Xiaogang held a secret meeting.  The farmers agreed to divide the communal land and assign it to individuals – each farmer had to produce a quota for the government but anything he or she produced in excess of the quota they would keep.  The agreement violated government policy and as a result the farmers also pledged that if any of them were to be killed or jailed the others would raise his or her children until the age of 18. [The actual agreement is shown at right.]

The change from collective property rights to something closer to private property rights had an immediate effect, investment, work effort and productivity increased.  “You can’t be lazy when you work for your family and yourself,” said one of the farmers.

Word of the secret agreement leaked out and local bureaucrats cut off Xiaogang from fertilizer, seeds and pesticides.  But amazingly, before Xiaogang could be stopped, farmers in other villages also began to abandon collective property. In Beijing, Mao Zedong was dead and a new set of rulers, seeing the productivity improvements, decided to let the experiment proceed.

For more background, NPR’s Planet Money has a great story on this secret agreement including this:

“Back then, even one straw belonged to the group,” says Yen Jingchang, who was a farmer in Xiaogang in 1978. “No one owned anything.”

At one meeting with communist party officials, a farmer asked: “What about the teeth in my head? Do I own those?” Answer: No. Your teeth belong to the collective.

In theory, the government would take what the collective grew, and would also distribute food to each family. There was no incentive to work hard — to go out to the fields early, to put in extra effort, Yen Jingchang says.

“Work hard, don’t work hard — everyone gets the same,” he says. “So people don’t want to work.”

…Before the contract, the farmers would drag themselves out into the field only when the village whistle blew, marking the start of the work day. After the contract, the families went out before dawn.

“We all secretly competed,” says Yen Jingchang. “Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person.”

It was the same land, the same tools and the same people. Yet just by changing the economic rules — by saying, you get to keep some of what you grow — everything changed.

(Crossposted at SeeTheInvisibleHandResourceBank.com)

*Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China*

That is the new book by Ezra F. Vogel, excerpt:

Deng in 1978 had an equally dramatic effect on the Japanese people.  In the 2,200 years of contact between China and its island neighbor, Deng was the first Chinese leader to set foot in Japan.  He was also the first to meet the Emperor of Japan.

So far the main lesson I am drawing from this book is how provincial the Chinese leaders were circa 1978, but also how willing they were to absorb evidence and change their minds, especially following visits to Western Europe and Singapore, both of which had significant impacts on them.  I am also learning that the 1979 war with Vietnam was a more significant event than I had thought.

The publication date of the book is listed as 26 September, but Amazon shipped my copy earlier this week.

China estimate of the day

Combined with central government debt and other liabilities such as bad bank loans, analysts estimate China’s overall explicit debt load is about 70 per cent of gross domestic product.

But some analysts believe the contingent liabilities of the government are much higher, once debts on the books of state-owned enterprises and other entities implicitly backed by the state are included.

“If you take a very broad view of the Chinese government’s contingent liabilities rather than explicit debt on the books then the number comes to well over 150 per cent of China’s GDP in 2010,” according to Victor Shih, a political economist at Northwestern University in the US. The US has a debt-to-GDP ratio of 93 per cent, while Japan’s ratio is over 225 per cent.

Here is more.

“It is too soon to tell” — the real story China fact of the day

The impact of the French Revolution? “Too early to say.”

Thus did Zhou Enlai – in responding to questions in the early 1970s about the popular revolt in France almost two centuries earlier – buttress China’s reputation as a far-thinking, patient civilisation.

The former premier’s answer has become a frequently deployed cliché, used as evidence of the sage Chinese ability to think long-term – in contrast to impatient westerners.

The trouble is that Zhou was not referring to the 1789 storming of the Bastille in a discussion with Richard Nixon during the late US president’s pioneering China visit. Zhou’s answer related to events only three years earlier – the 1968 students’ riots in Paris, according to Nixon’s interpreter at the time.

How so?

At a seminar in Washington to mark the publication of Henry Kissinger’s book, On China, Chas Freeman, a retired foreign service officer, sought to correct the long-standing error.

“I distinctly remember the exchange. There was a mis­understanding that was too delicious to invite correction,” said Mr Freeman.

He said Zhou had been confused when asked about the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. “But these were exactly the kinds of terms used by the students to describe what they were up to in 1968 and that is how Zhou understood them.”

But will this revelation diminish the use of this story?  Dare I say it is too soon to tell?  By the way:

The oft-quoted Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”, does not exist in China itself, scholars say.

Books of the year, 2010

Here is a meta-list of "best books of the year" lists; the selections I looked at did not thrill me, so here's my own list, in no particular order.  First tier:

Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography, by John A. Hall.

Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Charles Emmerson, The Future History of the Arctic.

Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

David Grossman, To the End of the Land.

State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974, by Dominic Sandbrook.

The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, edited by Patrick Crotty.

Winston's War: Churchill 1940-1945, by Max Hastings.

Kai Bird, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978.

Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory.

Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850.

As toss-ins, from the second tier, there are Understanding the Book of Mormon, Philippson's Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, Peter Watson's The German Genius, Mark Schatzger's Steak, Lydia Davis's Madame Bovary translation, Vietnam: Rising Dragon, Daniel Okrent's Last Call, Gary Gorton's The Panic of 2007, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, W. John Kress, The Weeping Goldsmith: Discoveries in the Land of Myanmar, a few more good books here, and last but not least Cowen and Tabarrok Modern Principles

Brought to you by The Age of the Infovore.