The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers Review

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The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers ReviewThrough a series of anecdotes and interviews, largely drawn from his eight years in China as correspondent for 'The Financial Times', Richard McGregor illustrates 'the Party', a remarkable social organization which subordinates 1.3 billion people.
It is a journalist's treatment rather than academic, so instead of explicitly offering analysis, Richard McGregor lets his interviews and stories largely speak for themselves. This provides a range of interesting characters, quotes and anecdotes. However, a side-effect is that many remarkable insights are either buried innocuously in the text or left to the reader's inference. The story is no less fascinating for it.
The picture that emerges is of a creative, adaptable, self-aware and resilient social network. Made up of 75 million party members, one in twelve adult Chinese, this self-perpetuating elite has no legal form beyond a mention in the preamble to China's constitution. The party exists outside the regular state apparatus and operates like a controller chip grafted into China's governing structures through party cells throughout government, the military, public companies and even private firms.
Grounded in its near ubiquitous presence in the state, military, public and private spheres, the Party maintains its grip via a number of interconnected and synergistic processes. Its personnel system allows any individual to be replaced, transferred or expelled at the will of the organism. Party control of the military provides ultimate coercive sanction. The Party's discipline system places members above the law even as it strengthens Party control of the behaviour of its members. The propaganda department uses sophisticated story telling to sculpt the narrative around events to conform to the Party's best interests.
Few join the party for ideological reasons. Rather, achieving party status is to gain membership into an elite club which, provided you stay within its unwritten bounds and contribute to the goals of the organism, gives a member a form of immunity from the law and other powers and abilities not available to the average citizen. In the corruption that is endemic in the system, everyone is guilty of something serious - from taking bribes, to tax evasion to sexual impropriety to failing to get proper permits. Members that stray out of bounds need not be punished for the real fault, but instead for one of the many more routine transgressions that hang over the heads of almost all party members. Were one not able to normally get away with routine transgressions, there would be little benefit to party membership. Yet simply knowing that straying too far will result in being punished for something entirely different is enough to self-censor unwanted behaviours, in particular the unwritten ones.
Self-reflexive and analytic, the party is alert to the internal and external dangers it faces and has proven able to respond to challenge with remarkable agility, creativity and effectiveness.
Though the book is very much about the Party at present, in 2010, glimpses of party history serve to illustrate the nature of the organism and its ability to adapt and reinvent itself.
For example, Richard McGregor declares a historic milestone the Party's peaceful and administrative transfer of power in 2002 to a new top grouping of apparatchiks. For the first time in over 2000 years of Chinese history, China was no longer ruled by a single individual seen as a sort of a god. Instead, the apex of China became a committee atop an organism which permeates into the whole society, with the next shifting of interchangable personalities at the top scheduled for 2012.
In 1992, only ten years prior to the 2002 milestone, again demonstrating forward looking pragmatic realism, the party transformed itself on entrepreneurs - the most extreme enemies of communism - not just by allowing them to join the party, but by actively recruiting them. Binding China's rapidly emerging entrepreneurial elites to the party provided benefits to both sides, allowing entrepreneurs more freedom from the stultifying strictures of state apparatus while reinforcing and renewing Party control on an element of Chinese society that may have come to threaten the Party's very existence.
Prior to that, the shock of Tiananmen square and the fall of the former Soviet Bloc caused a wave of realistic threat assessment and self-reflection within the Party. This lead to further creative and pragmatic changes, though not in the ways that analysts in the west might have guessed or hoped for.
Given the importance of the Party in China and the growing importance of China in the world, it behooves us to better understand it. Richard McGregor's fascinating and informative book is recommended reading for those interested in understanding not just the Party, but the modern China within which it operates.The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers Overview

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Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future Review

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Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future ReviewIn a recent interview, Ian Goldin said (and I am paraphrasing) that if he was ever made dictator of the world for one day he would prohibit people who don't believe in globalization from consuming or using any product that was produced in a foreign country or was made from raw materials that have come from other countries. These people will be so miserable. They will not be able to use cell phones, cars, etc... Well, you get the point.
In this book, the authors lay down the case that immigration is good for the sending countries, it's good for the receiving countries, it's good for the migrant and it's good for the world in general. The authors provide plenty of empirical evidence to back this argument. To state a few:
1.According to data from the World Bank, migrants send back home over $350 billion a year, a sum much greater than all world aid granted to developing nations.
2. A big part of this money goes to education for the next generation, which helps grow the economy over the long run.
3. At an aggregate level, immigration stimulates the economy of receiving countries because low skilled foreign workers often take the jobs that are not wanted by native workers. Furthermore, by taking these jobs, business are able to offer services at a lower price which every consumer benefits from. According to the authors, "in the late 1980s and 1990s U.S. cities that had high levels of immigration saw reductions in the costs of housekeeping, gardening, child care, dry cleaning, and other labor intensive services." (p.167).
4. A common fallacy is that foreign workers rely on social benefits and therefore are a drag on taxpayers and the economy in general. According to the authors this is just not true: "Research based on data from 2004 to 2008 on the net fiscal impact of the immigration of Polish, Czech, and other migrants to the UK from ten countries that joined the European Union in 2004 showed that the migrants contributed 'significantly' more in taxes than they received in benefits and services." (p.170).
5. Highly skilled foreign workers also contribute by starting new businesses and creating new jobs. Migrants have founded Google, Intel, PayPal, eBay and Yahoo. Moreover, migrants account for around 25% of all global patent applications from the United States.
This book couldn't have been published at a better time when governments all over the world have been implementing stricter and stricter rules against immigration due to the financial crisis. Hopefully, policy-makers will read this book and implement some of its ideas.

In conclusion, this book is well argued and researched. It has plenty of interesting statistics and profound ideas that will be greatly appreciated by people interested in such topics. Highly recommended.Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future Overview

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Decentralization and Local Governance in Developing Countries: A Comparative Perspective Review

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Decentralization and Local Governance in Developing Countries: A Comparative Perspective ReviewThis book is good especially for those who interested on decentralization. This book gives many study case from other countries.Decentralization and Local Governance in Developing Countries: A Comparative Perspective Overview

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Corruption in International Business (Corporate Social Responsibility) Review

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Corruption in International Business (Corporate Social Responsibility) ReviewThis book is designed to fill a gap in the education of business students and to serve those who will be engaged in international business. While graduate business studies cover international trade and marketing and ethics and corporate social responsibility, few programs put all of these together. This book is meant to help prepare students and professionals about "real world" corruption and professional misconduct that occurs in many, if not most, countries in the world. As well as academic discussion about quantifying corruption, this book includes case studies of countries' battles to control corruption in both the public and private sectors.
Corruption in International Business (Corporate Social Responsibility) Overview

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Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World Review

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Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World ReviewThis is an important book. It will broaden your view of what is happening in the world today as millions of people set out to make new lives in new lands.
Almost everyone in the world is being affected, in some way, by this movement. They may live where new people are arriving. They may be the ones arriving. Or, perhaps, they are ones left behind, but benefitting from funds sent back.
Some of these relocations are successful. Others fail dismally. It is important that these inevitable movements of people do succeed because it influences the well being of everyone in a city, region, country, or, even, the world. Saunders takes a look at successes and failures over time and points out the important differences. There is a lot to be learned here.
However, I was very disappointed in the writing style. You would expect a respected journalist to write with clarity and a crisp lively style. Instead Saunders is prone to long, convoluted, run-on sentences that often take a careful parsing to find what he really intends to say. To compound matters, the huge numbers of asides, included in parenthesis, are nearly as complex as the rest of their sentence.
So, be forewarned. This book is definitely worth reading, but be prepared to work hard to get the valuable information it has to offer.Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World Overview

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Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks Within China's Floating Population Review

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Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks Within China's Floating Population ReviewThe economic reform that started in China in 1978 has brought about the creation of floating population, in which as many as 100 million people left their villages and streamed into cities where manufacturing factories and businesses were booming. In the cities, these rural migrants are considered strangers and outsiders. Since they are denied formal urban membership and substantive rights, they have to struggle hard for a living space. How did they deal with different powers in order to claim their space and have their own rights guarded and protected?
For those interested in knowing about the formation conditions and existence strategies of the floating population in China, Li Zhang's book is worth reading. This is an ethnographic study on a particular migrant enclave in Beijing, which is called Zhejiangcun and only five kilometers from China's political centre, Tiananmen Square. The largest migrant settlement in Beijing, Zhejiangcun is mainly made up by the petty entrepreneurs originating from Wenzhou, a municipal city in Zhejiang province. It took shape in the 1980s and had nearly 100,000 migrant workers in 1995. Making use of pre-accumulated small capital and extended kinship ties, the entrepreneurs run family-based businesses mainly in garment manufacturing and trade. The settlement appears startlingly different from those formed by migrant workers (mingong) who have nothing but their labor to sell and depend heavily on the urban labor market for work. As small manufacturers and traders with economic resources, the Wenzhou migrant entrepreneurs in Zhejiangcun have the edge over other migrant workers as they are more capable to create native-place-based enclaves, workable social connections, and higher business flexibility.
As reflected in the subtitle of the book, Li Zhang explores three key issues - space, power, and social networks. More specifically, she demonstrates how the Wenzhou migrants gained, lost, and rebuilt a space in Beijing by strengthening social networks with fellow natives and forging power relations with the local government officials.
The book is well structured into a chronological order to show the formation and changes of the space in Zhejiangcun. Chapter 1 is a broader analysis of how the Chinese party system attempted to control and to manage the floating population that has grown in numbers in many cities. Li Zhang argues that the rural migrants, while their everyday practices were to some extent regulated by the government, they were able to create "alternative modes of social life and multifocal community life beyond a single, fixed geographic location." (p. 20).
In Chapter 2, Li Zhang traces how a distinctive historical commercial culture and petty capitalist economy nurtured Wenzhou migrant's present economic and spatial practices. She maps their migration routes and underscores the importance of family and native-place networks in the migration trajectories.
Chapters 3 and 4 explore how the privatization of space and power has been taking place concurrently in Zhejiangcun in the context of China's reform into market economy. More specifically, Chapter 3 shows how Wenzhou migrants appropriated land in local villages to create large residential with new social and political meanings. Chapter 3 demonstrates how the migrant leadership emerged and expanded their social and spatial bases of Zhejiangcun.
Once formed, Zhejiangcun evolved with its power structure changing in the space. As Li Zhang shows in Chapter 5, not merely the gender and domestic relations have changed, but the Wenzhou migrant households and production have also reorganized spatially. In the midst of these changes, the social order was damaged by increased crimes. Chapter 6 examines the different interpretations of the origin of crimes offered by the Wenzhou migrants and officials.
The social disorders led to the political conflicts between the upper-level governments and Wenzhou migrants and local residents. The authorities launched a number of cleanup campaigns in Zhejiangcun. Chapter 7 shows that the social conflicts actually involved many levels and the popular resistance during the campaign highlights the disparity, instability, different motivations and interest within the state.
The members of Zhejiangcun were able to challenge and manipulate land-use regulation through clientelist ties with local officials. Indeed, Zhejiangcun has survived the cleanup actions. Li Zhang shows in Chapter 8 that the Wenzhou migrants were able to make a return to Zhejiangcun by forming new commercial alliances with closed-down state factories and local government.
With this book, Li Zhang has tried to address a bigger question: how different components of the Chinese society position themselves in the midst of the rapid economic transformation and the subsequent restructuring of power relations. As indicated in the Conclusion, the point Li Zhang wants to make clear is to "resist the assumption that current societal transformations in China will necessarily lead to the demise of the socialist regime" (p. 208). Indeed Li Zhang has successfully shown that "indigenous petty capitalism coexists with state-owned enterprises and managed foreign capital, which together reshape the contours of Chinese society, one that is based on the interplay of market forces, traditional social relations, and state regulatory power." (p. 208).
I highly recommend this book to those who want to read about the internal migrants and petty entrepreneurs in China in the reform period.Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks Within China's Floating Population Overview

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