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What the U.S. Can Learn from China: An Open-Minded Guide to Treating Our Greatest Competitor as Our Greatest Teacher
While America is still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis, a high unemployment rate, and a surge in government debt, China’s economy is the second largest in the world, and many predict it will surpass the United States’ by 2020. President Obama called China’s rise “a Sputnik moment”—will America seize this moment or continue to treat China as its scapegoat?
Mainstream media and the U.S. government regularly target China as a threat. Rather than viewing China’s power, influence, and contributions to the global economy in a negative light, Ann Lee asks, What can America learn from its competition?
Why did China recover so quickly after the global economic meltdown? What accounts for China’s extraordinary growth, despite one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world? How does the Chinese political system avoid partisan rancor but achieve genuine public accountability? From education to governance to foreign aid, Lee details the policies and practices that have made China a global power and then isolates the ways the United States can use China’s enduring principles to foster much-needed change at home.
This is no whitewash. Lee is fully aware of China’s shortcomings, particularly in the area of human rights. She has relatives who suffered during the Cultural Revolution. But by overemphasizing our differences with China, the United States stands to miss a vital opportunity. Filled with sharp insights and thorough research, What the U.S. Can Learn from China is Lee’s rallying cry for a new approach at a time when learning from one another is the key to surviving and thriving.
Mainstream media and the U.S. government regularly target China as a threat. Rather than viewing China’s power, influence, and contributions to the global economy in a negative light, Ann Lee asks, What can America learn from its competition?
Why did China recover so quickly after the global economic meltdown? What accounts for China’s extraordinary growth, despite one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world? How does the Chinese political system avoid partisan rancor but achieve genuine public accountability? From education to governance to foreign aid, Lee details the policies and practices that have made China a global power and then isolates the ways the United States can use China’s enduring principles to foster much-needed change at home.
This is no whitewash. Lee is fully aware of China’s shortcomings, particularly in the area of human rights. She has relatives who suffered during the Cultural Revolution. But by overemphasizing our differences with China, the United States stands to miss a vital opportunity. Filled with sharp insights and thorough research, What the U.S. Can Learn from China is Lee’s rallying cry for a new approach at a time when learning from one another is the key to surviving and thriving.
- GenresChinaNonfictionEconomics
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 9, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 30, 2015
This is a useful book that shows that there are no good guys and bad guys, just different approaches, each with their own flaws and advantages. It was fairly discouraging to read about many of the ways in which the US is losing its way, but there is hope. Looking to China as a competitor to be respected, rather than an enemy to be feared and resented, is a fine start.
July 22, 2024
I read this book with great anticipation, as it is the first to turn the mirror on American economic policy and planning, from a comparative perspective involving China, and it does so insightfully and compellingly. Lee clearly speaks as the insider she is on financial matters, and as one who has long straddled two cultures. The prudent pragmatism of China's leadership has helped it to avoid the fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union, though it has not been able to take the Japanese path to international economic power, instead having to settle for a tremendous amount of direct foreign investment. That said, the Chinese have shown a remarkable willingess to adapt and learn from the West, both good and bad, how to conduct economic policy. The book makes abundantly evident that despite the advantage of being able to make policy decisions arbitrarily, the Chinese leadership has been stewards of a cautious course of economic development that has mostly served the country well, though the rapid economic rise has inevitably led to a large wealth gap, exacerbated by rampant corruption. Of course, industrial espionage and until recently wholesale copyright violation has not hurt their cause any, nor has the ability to control the banking system, and regulate the currency by refusing to make it readily convertible. All this aside, China has made planning decisions relatively free from political interference, and not only because of one-party rule.
Where I find fault in this book--and where I think the author is on shaky ground--is in her analysis of American foreign policy. On this topic she overextends herself well beyond her area of expertise, which I found off-putting. Her perception that China has used its soft power shrewdly is mistaken: its policies appeal to mutual economic benefit without regard for their moral and ethnical ramifications. Never mind that China looks the other way while conducting trade with Iran, North Korea, and the Sudan, among other rogue regimes, or that it enforces colonial rule on Tibet and Xinjiang, and attempts to lay claim hundreds of kilometers of coastal waters. In an interview recently with CCTV News in Beijing, Lee insinuated that American propaganda (which is how she characterizes our campaign for human rights and democracy) paves the way for the military industrial complex. She also described our use of soft power as hypocritical, making the speciously narrow claim that the treatment of Black men in our prison system excludes us from being able to condemn human rights violations abroad. In this regard, she is either naive or disingenuous, but in either case playing the role of the useful idiot.
Where I find fault in this book--and where I think the author is on shaky ground--is in her analysis of American foreign policy. On this topic she overextends herself well beyond her area of expertise, which I found off-putting. Her perception that China has used its soft power shrewdly is mistaken: its policies appeal to mutual economic benefit without regard for their moral and ethnical ramifications. Never mind that China looks the other way while conducting trade with Iran, North Korea, and the Sudan, among other rogue regimes, or that it enforces colonial rule on Tibet and Xinjiang, and attempts to lay claim hundreds of kilometers of coastal waters. In an interview recently with CCTV News in Beijing, Lee insinuated that American propaganda (which is how she characterizes our campaign for human rights and democracy) paves the way for the military industrial complex. She also described our use of soft power as hypocritical, making the speciously narrow claim that the treatment of Black men in our prison system excludes us from being able to condemn human rights violations abroad. In this regard, she is either naive or disingenuous, but in either case playing the role of the useful idiot.
March 18, 2023
Brilliant premise, questionable execution
Ann Lee is absolutely right in that the United States has much to learn from China, and she makes a particularly excellent case for the utility of Confucian values, investment in technology and infrastructure, focus on long-term goals, building soft power alongside and in collaboration with developing nations, and committing to serving its people by drastically improving their standard of living. That said, I feel the book's take on China's crackdown on protests and dissent to be particularly troubling; these people are not akin to the terrorists America combats, as Lee asserts, but are the very citizens China is supposed to serve. They may be temporarily disrupting the civil order, as Lee points out, but some of the protestors could help China build a better, more robust society for all, if only the government would listen. More troubling to me, the book never once addresses the alarming state surveillance programs, labor conditions tantamount to slavery, or the genocide of the Uyghur people.
While Lee is certainly right that the United States is guilty of these crimes and far worse, I would like to hear her argument in defense of these practices in China. In my opinion, human rights should apply to all people everywhere.
Ann Lee is absolutely right in that the United States has much to learn from China, and she makes a particularly excellent case for the utility of Confucian values, investment in technology and infrastructure, focus on long-term goals, building soft power alongside and in collaboration with developing nations, and committing to serving its people by drastically improving their standard of living. That said, I feel the book's take on China's crackdown on protests and dissent to be particularly troubling; these people are not akin to the terrorists America combats, as Lee asserts, but are the very citizens China is supposed to serve. They may be temporarily disrupting the civil order, as Lee points out, but some of the protestors could help China build a better, more robust society for all, if only the government would listen. More troubling to me, the book never once addresses the alarming state surveillance programs, labor conditions tantamount to slavery, or the genocide of the Uyghur people.
While Lee is certainly right that the United States is guilty of these crimes and far worse, I would like to hear her argument in defense of these practices in China. In my opinion, human rights should apply to all people everywhere.
December 16, 2019
Economics- based and almost Confucian comparison of the countries, which centres the Chinese leadership's 'service' and 'long-range planning' mentality. The accuracy of the model is of course up for debate.
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May 28, 2013"What the U.S. Can Learn From China: An Open-Minded Guide to Treating Our Greatest Competitor as Our Greatest Teacher" was Book No. 11 for 2013.
I think I'd like to re-read this book every year!
I think I'd like to re-read this book every year!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews