Getting Rich First - Duncan Hewitt

Newsweek journalist Duncan Hewitt gave this afternoon a presentation from his new book Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China. Most books about China focus on the political or business stories, often forgetting that for at least a part of the Chinese the past decade has been nothing short of amazing.
"It took China a decade to realize what European countries did in forty years after the second world war," Hewitt said. The effect of those changes has been carefully documented in his book with beautiful anecdotes from real people.
Duncan Hewett today also kindly accepted our earlier invitation to join our speakers' bureau at Chinabiz Speakers.

politics - The Party is here to stay

For years people with different political sympathies in the West did find common ground in the conviction that China's political systems was going to change. The country could not manage its economy and other problems without more political participation of its citizens. Economic growth would push China's middle class to more political demands.
Tha arguments were different, but the outcome would be the same: after the economic changes, political changes were inevitable.
I have never been too sure about that. In China you could see how the government was able to manage it multiple crises and learn from it. And as long as the economic growth continues, there are not reason to expect much to change in the mostly a-political attitude of its citizens.
Arthur Kroeber points in the same direction in the Financial Times, here in a pick up by A Glimpse of the World:

The China-must-reform-as-we-say-it-must fantasy has been most clearly articulated by two recent books. China’s Trapped Transition, by Minxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment, claims that corruption has so overwhelmed the Chinese state that it is rapidly losing the capacity to deal with all sorts of social problems. The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century, by Will Hutton (reviewed by Martin Wolf in the FT on February 2), asserts that “the Chinese economy and the Chinese Communist Party are in an unstable halfway house” between socialism and capitalism, and that the party must surrender its monopoly on power – soon – or risk economic collapse.