The China Price
The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage
1 of 1 copy available
In a country with almost no transparency, where graft is institutionalized and workers have little recourse to the rule of law, incentives to lie about business practices vastly outweigh incentives to tell the truth. Harney reveals that despite a decade of monitoring factories, outsiders all too often have no idea of the conditions under which goods from China are made. She exposes the widespread practice of using a dummy or model factory as a company's false window out to the world, concealing a vast number of illegal factories operating completely off the books. Some Western companies are better than others about sniffing out such deception, but too many are perfectly happy to embrace plausible deniability as long as the prices remain so low. And in the Gold Rush atmosphere that has infected the country, in which everyone is clamoring to get rich and corruption is rampant, it's almost impossible for the Chinese government's own underfunded regulatory mechanisms to do much good at all.
Perhaps the most important revelation in The China Price is how fast change is coming, one way or another. A generation of Chinese flocked from the rural interior of the country to its coastline, where the factory jobs are in the largest mass migration in human history; but that migration has slowed dramatically, in no small part because of widespread disenchantment with the way of life the factories offer. As pollution in China's industrial cities worsens and their infrastructure buckles, and as grassroots activism for more legal recourse grows, pressures are mounting on the system that will not dissipate without profound change. Managing the violence of that change is the greatest challenge China faces in the near future, and managing its impact on the world economy is the challenge that faces us all.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 15, 2008 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781400126095
- File size: 302950 KB
- Duration: 10:31:08
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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The phrase "China price" refers to how much it would cost to make something in China. But this book goes beyond that and explores the price China itself pays for its rapid industrialization as well as the price the rest of the world pays. The book is almost scholarly in tone and syntax. This style poses a problem for the narrator and the listener. The narrator can't introduce artifice simply to entertain the listener, so there is the risk of sounding dull. At the same time, the complexity of some of the material requires concentration by the listener. It's easy for casual listeners to miss salient points. By and large, Karen White overcomes this problem, but listeners will still need to pay careful attention. R.C.G. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine -
December 10, 2007
Dreaded by competitors, “the China price” has become “the lowest price possible,” the hallmark of China’s incredibly cheap, ubiquitous manufacturers. Financial Times
editor Harney explores the hidden price tag for China’s economic juggernaut. It’s a familiar but engrossing tale of Dickensian industrialization. Chinese factory hands work endless hours for miserable wages in dusty, sweltering workshops, slowly succumbing to occupational ailments or suddenly losing a limb to a machine. Coal-fired power plants spew pollutants into nearly unbreathable air. Migrants from the countryside, harassed by China’s hukou
system of internal passports, form a readily exploitable labor pool with few legal protections. The system is fueled by Western investment and, Harney observes, hypocrisy. Retailers like Wal-Mart impose social responsibility codes on their Chinese suppliers, but refuse to pay the costs of raising labor standards; the result is a pervasive system of cheating through fake employment records and secret uninspected factories, to which Western companies turn a blind eye. But Harney also finds stirrings of change; aided by regional labor shortages, rising wages and intrepid activists. Chinese workers are demanding—and gradually winning—more rights. Packed with facts, figures and sympathetic portraits of Chinese workers and managers, Harney’s is a perceptive take on the world’s workshop.
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