China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower
Challenges America and the World
By
Ted C. Fishman
Synopsis
China today is visible
everywhere -- in the news, in the economic pressures
battering the globe, in our workplaces, and in every
trip to the store. Provocative, timely, and essential --
and updated with new statistics and information -- this
dramatic account of China's growing dominance as an
industrial superpower by journalist Ted C. Fishman
explains how the profound shift in the world economic
order has occurred -- and why it already affects us all.
How has an enormous country once hobbled by poverty and
Communist ideology come to be the supercharged center of
global capitalism? What does it mean that China now
grows three times faster than the United States? Why do
nearly all of the world's biggest companies have large
operations in China? What does the corporate march into
China mean for workers left behind in America, Europe,
and the rest of the world?
Meanwhile, what makes China's emerging corporations so
dangerously competitive? What will happen when China
manufactures nearly everything -- computers, cars, jumbo
jets, and pharmaceuticals -- that the United States and
Europe can, at perhaps half the cost? How do these
developments reach around the world and straight into
all of our lives?
These are ground-shaking questions, and China, Inc.
provides answers.
Veteran journalist Ted C. Fishman shows how China will
force all of us to make big changes in how we think
about ourselves as consumers, workers, citizens, and
even as parents. The result is a richly engaging work of
penetrating, up-to-the-minute reportage and brilliant
analysis that will forever change how readers think
about America's future.
Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans
By
Jean Pfaelzer
Synopsis
The brutal and systematic
"ethnic cleansing" of Chinese Americans in California
and the Pacific Northwest in the second half of the
nineteenth century is a shocking-and virtually
unexplored-chapter of American history. Driven Out
unearths this forgotten episode in our nation's past.
Drawing on years of groundbreaking research, Jean
Pfaelzer reveals how, beginning in 1848, lawless
citizens and duplicitous politicians purged dozens of
communities of thousands of Chinese residents—and how
the victims bravely fought back.
In town after town, as races and classes were pitted
against one another in the raw and anarchistic West,
Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and field
workers, prostitutes and merchants' wives, were gathered
up at gunpoint and marched out of town, sometimes thrown
into railroad cars along the very tracks they had built.
Here, in vivid detail, are unforgettable incidents such
as the torching of the Chinatown in Antioch, California,
after Chinese prostitutes were accused of giving seven
young men syphilis, and a series of lynchings in Los
Angeles bizarrely provoked by a Chinese wedding. From
the port of Seattle to the mining towns in California's
Siskiyou Mountains to "Nigger Alley" in Los Angeles, the
first Chinese Americans were hanged, purged, and
banished. Chinatowns across the West were burned to the
ground.
But the Chinese fought back: They filed the first
lawsuits for reparations in the United States, sued for
the restoration of their property, prosecuted white
vigilantes, demanded the right to own land, and, years
before Brown v. Board of Education, won access to public
education for their children. Chinese Americans
organized strikes and vegetable boycotts in order to
starve out towns that tried to expel them. They ordered
arms from China and, with Winchester rifles and Colt
revolvers, defended themselves. In 1893, more than
100,000 Chinese Americans refused the government's order
to wear photo identity cards to prove their legal
status-the largest mass civil disobedience in United
States history to that point.
Driven Out features riveting characters, both heroic and
villainous, white and Asian. Charles McGlashen, a
newspaper editor, spearheaded a shift in the tactics of
persecution, from brutality to legal boycotts of the
Chinese, in order to mount a run for governor of
California. Fred Bee, a creator of the Pony Express,
became the Chinese consul and one of the few attorneys
willing to defend the Chinese. Lum May, a dry goods
store owner, saw his wife dragged from their home and
driven insane. President Grover Cleveland, hoping that
China's 400,000 subjects would buy the United States out
of its economic crisis, persuaded China to abandon the
overseas Chinese in return for a trade treaty. Quen Hing
Tong, a merchant, sought an injunction against the city
of San Jose in an important precursor to today's suits
against racial profiling and police brutality.
In Driven Out, Jean Pfaelzer sheds a harsh light on
America's past. This is a story of hitherto unknown
racial pogroms, purges, roundups, and brutal terror, but
also a record of valiant resistance and community. This
deeply resonant and eye-opening work documents a
significant and disturbing episode in American history.
The Covenant and the Mandate of Heaven:
An in-depth comparative cultural study of Judaism and
China
By Tiberiu Weisz
Synopsis:
If China is yin there must be
an opposing culture that matches her in endurance,
sustainability and depth.
Is Judaism the yang of China’s
yin?
What cultural bonds tied
Judaism and China?
Israel and China, past,
present and future.
These are just some of the
topics explored in this book in a historical setting:
not Chinese nor Jewish, but Chinese AND Jewish. The book
compares ancient and contemporary Chinese sources with
corresponding Western literature to show that these two
cultures balanced each other in a cultural relationship
of YIN and YANG: one as a religion that deeply
influenced Western cultures and the other in an opposing
environment secluded, isolated and little understood by
outsiders.
The book also presents China
and Judaism through the eyes of the people who have
faithfully followed their tenets since antiquity.
Readers will see these two cultures in a new light: not
as "fossils" but as two vibrant cultures tied by
invisible bonds to survive and flourish to present day.