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Title details for China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Inc. by Willem Van Kemenade - Available

China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Inc.

The Dynamics of a New Empire

by Willem Van Kemenade
ebook
2 of 2 copies available
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2 of 2 copies available
On the eve of June 30, Hong Kong was officially passed back to China. This event will mark what Willem van Kemenade sees as the start of an increasingly problematic — and even dangerous — reintegration of the old Chinese empire into a new world superpower. Since the early 1980s, investment money has been pouring into China from Hong Kong and trade has escalated at a rocket's pace. A few years later, the same pattern began between China and Taiwan. The combination of Hong Kong/Taiwan management, financial and export know-how with China's inexhaustible pool of cheap labor and land has enabled China in one decade to leap from an impoverished revolutionary state to a major international trading power. This economic boom, in conjunction with the violation of intellectual property rights, systematic tax fraud, and the corruption of the police force, has helped shape the "socialist market economy," China's third way — and a new mix of old-fashioned Soviet Communism and East Asian capitalism.
The formal addition of Hong Kong will add to this mixture the democratic structures set in place by the British. And, as China moves to reclaim Taiwan (the process has already begun), it will be incorporating a rival Chinese sub-nation with a fully election-based political system and a powerful independence movement. Can such a reunified China resist the "spiritual pollution" of democratic values, human rights, and political freedom? Will it become the first depoliticized "corporatist superpower"? What are the prospects that reunification will be peaceful?
Van Kemenade's portrait of the true internal power structures of the three Chinas provides our clearest look yet at the fastest-rising new empire in the world today.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    December 1, 2010

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780307758361

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780307758361
      • File size: 2428 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from June 2, 1997
      For the past 20 years, van Kemenade, a Dutch journalist, has been posted to Hong Kong and Beijing. During that time he has made frequent visits to China's provinces and stayed for extended periods in Taipei and Jakarta; he lives in Beijing and is married to a Taiwanese. The book, which is based on these experiences, is a riveting analysis of China's recent past and reflections on its future direction. Van Kemenade explores the anticipated political and economic fallout from the mainland's absorption of capitalist Hong Kong later this year and the possibility of its eventual takeover of Taiwan. He projects a foreseeable confrontation with Japan over Asian hegemony, ethnic and economic upheavals on China's "wild" western border that abutts former Soviet republics and a political backlash from the fast-growing middle class, which in its pursuit of wealth seems no longer loyal to socialist ideals. Concluding that China will continue to prosper economically, he predicts that politically it will remain as "secretive... and repressive as ever." This window onto the Middle Kingdom at the turn of the century should hold great interest for China watchers.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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