New Books I've Read About China

In the past few months I've read three recently published books about China. Perhaps some readers have been to China. I have not. We have friends, a couple from China who were our students, that offered to host us on a trip there. That would have been wonderful but the time when we could do that has passed. 

All of the three books were written by Chinese people. The first one explained how a person from the U.S. might understand the economic system. He wrote that China is like the U.S, would be if we took the presidents of the largest companies in the country and assigned them the highest posts in government. If we did that, without our kind of elections, he said, we would be China. Bill Gates would have the budget of the Federal Government to build the U.S. tech industry. The trucking exec for government truck policy, the road contractor, car manufacturer, housing, etc. Each industry chases its own growth without a broader view. This is why China has hundreds of skyscrapers that are empty, acres of cars unsold, etc.

Another book was by a Chinese man who spent decades trying to get ahead. He wrote about the 23 different jobs he had had. He started several small businesses, worked for many difficult bosses and left each of them. He is single. His salary always allowed an apartment and spartan living without a car. He had motor scooters.

The last book was about the underground internet world in China. There have been cycles of freedom of expression followed by crack downs and surveillance. The author followed the lives of six people who used the internet for their careers and social lives. One is a gay man. During periods of heave government monitoring, such as right now, people learned how to circumvent government rules. Sometimes they did this be opening chat rooms knowing they would be quickly shut down, then opening a new one quickly. Both those posting and those reading developed their own systems to outmaneuver the government.  

The books, and my many Chinese friends, give a picture of a huge country teaming with creative, determined and independent-minded people.