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Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China
Welcome to the new China, a nation in perpetual fast forward - where cities rebuild themselves in double quick time, peasants leave the land in their millions, and parents scratch their heads as the young generation embraces pop culture, the internet and the sexual revolution, while the new middle-classes rush to enjoy previously unimaginable lifestyles, the ruling Communist Party struggles to keep up with shifting values among calls for a more open media and society and an ever-growing wealth gap.
Through individual stories, former BBC correspondent Duncan Hewitt paints a memorable picture of China in all its complex, contradictory, often startling reality.
Through individual stories, former BBC correspondent Duncan Hewitt paints a memorable picture of China in all its complex, contradictory, often startling reality.
320 pages, Paperback
First published May 22, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 3, 2019
“China: Getting Rich First” is a description of society in present-day China. Although it frequently discusses the government and Communism, it is really concerned with the day-to-day life of typical citizens and how society is changing. Thus, it is subtitled “A Modern Social History”. For such an expansive topic, the book comes in at just under 500 pages, and it covers a broad range of topics. So, although the author gives an enormous amount of data and anecdotes, it is merely sufficient to handle the task at hand.
The book is divided into thirteen chapters, each of which could be expanded into a book of its own. There are chapters which deal with the rapid rate of building in the major cities. Entire neighborhoods are razed to the ground and modern buildings raised in their place at a frantic pace. Although this leads to a modernization of the country, it also leads to displacement of many citizens, many of which have difficulty dealing with such drastic changes to their basic lifestyles.
Shanghai has a chapter all to itself, as it is perhaps the city of greatest change and growth. It also has among the most influence from other countries and foreign corporations, and is more of an international city than most others.
All of the growth is leading to changes in the expectations of the populace. Whereas before they expected a life of subsistence with no frills, now many are aspiring to earn college degrees and get employed as highly paid professionals. It is interesting to see the change from a severe Communist economy to Capitalism. Income and wealth acquisition are now primary focuses for most of the citizens.
It is also interesting to see how the government itself is pushing a capitalist economy and is diminishing the old style Communist ideal. One of the drawbacks to that is the loss of a social safety net that everyone had under the old Red regime. The Chinese now are getting more and more concerned with the cost and availability of health care and retirement, much as we see in the West.
The media are also developing. Under the old guard, there was strict control of all content. Today, there is still an oversight of the media, but they are much freer to report on a wide variety of topics. The populace now have to exposure to news items from around the country and from foreign sources. This has lead to the development of entertainment influences. Especially among the young, you now see evolving trends in clothing, hairstyle, speech, etc. This, in turn, has led to friction between the generations, much as we see in the West.
Additional chapters deal with: the education system; the sexual revolution in China; migration from rural areas to the cities; the development of a consumer economy; and, religion. These are all very interesting topics, and the author has used many anecdotes, interviews and data sources throughout the book.
The author lived in China for years. He has been a correspondent for the BBC and Newsweek. His writing is professional and well documented.
The book is very information dense, and it is not a quick, easy read. The book is from 2008, so I am sure it is outdated in parts, but I still found it to be informative. As a side note, I was intrigued to see many parallels between Chinese culture and the West. China under Mao was diametrically opposed to America, but now the two cultures have much more in common than they have differences.
If you’re interested in learning about modern day China, this is a good place to start.
The book is divided into thirteen chapters, each of which could be expanded into a book of its own. There are chapters which deal with the rapid rate of building in the major cities. Entire neighborhoods are razed to the ground and modern buildings raised in their place at a frantic pace. Although this leads to a modernization of the country, it also leads to displacement of many citizens, many of which have difficulty dealing with such drastic changes to their basic lifestyles.
Shanghai has a chapter all to itself, as it is perhaps the city of greatest change and growth. It also has among the most influence from other countries and foreign corporations, and is more of an international city than most others.
All of the growth is leading to changes in the expectations of the populace. Whereas before they expected a life of subsistence with no frills, now many are aspiring to earn college degrees and get employed as highly paid professionals. It is interesting to see the change from a severe Communist economy to Capitalism. Income and wealth acquisition are now primary focuses for most of the citizens.
It is also interesting to see how the government itself is pushing a capitalist economy and is diminishing the old style Communist ideal. One of the drawbacks to that is the loss of a social safety net that everyone had under the old Red regime. The Chinese now are getting more and more concerned with the cost and availability of health care and retirement, much as we see in the West.
The media are also developing. Under the old guard, there was strict control of all content. Today, there is still an oversight of the media, but they are much freer to report on a wide variety of topics. The populace now have to exposure to news items from around the country and from foreign sources. This has lead to the development of entertainment influences. Especially among the young, you now see evolving trends in clothing, hairstyle, speech, etc. This, in turn, has led to friction between the generations, much as we see in the West.
Additional chapters deal with: the education system; the sexual revolution in China; migration from rural areas to the cities; the development of a consumer economy; and, religion. These are all very interesting topics, and the author has used many anecdotes, interviews and data sources throughout the book.
The author lived in China for years. He has been a correspondent for the BBC and Newsweek. His writing is professional and well documented.
The book is very information dense, and it is not a quick, easy read. The book is from 2008, so I am sure it is outdated in parts, but I still found it to be informative. As a side note, I was intrigued to see many parallels between Chinese culture and the West. China under Mao was diametrically opposed to America, but now the two cultures have much more in common than they have differences.
If you’re interested in learning about modern day China, this is a good place to start.
August 8, 2014
We travelled in China in 1992 and again in 2008. Whilst we knew the country had changed a great deal in that time, we were staggered by the scale of the changes (not merely tower blocks in international cities) in less than a generation. This book, written by a British journalist who lived and travelled in China, examines the upheavals over a similar period, with more background detail than we accumulated in two three-week trips, but which chimes very closely with our impressions.
July 13, 2014
A functional, yet completely fascinating look at China’s progression since the 1980′s, Getting Rich First blew my mind with the sheer scale of, well of pretty much everything that is happening in this ancient country hurtling like an express train into modernity, if not quite as an open modernity as might be hoped. To start with, the numbers are bigger, in England our employment figures hover around one, to two million, or thereabouts, it increases or decreases in the thousands, or tens of thousands. I couldn’t quite get my head around the quote at the head of this review, 12 million people made redundant from state enterprises in 1998 alone. I couldn’t really put it into context, and these staggering figures are all the way through the book.
It’s not just the figures, Hewitt includes a wealth of personal stories in this, some poignant, some successful, many less so. What they do is paint a picture of a Government, and society, struggling to keep up with the pace of change it is feverishly trying to expedite. For a society as ancient and venerable as the Chinese, there is a seeming lack of concern about knocking down old buildings, juxtaposed with their thousands of years of heritage. As home ownership becomes more important, more space is needed to build houses, stretching further from the centre of the cities and razing to the ground old properties (many of which are no longer suitable for inhabiting, but are still called home to a few). Indeed, Jeffrey Wong, in one of my favourite parts, started buying old buildings and relocating them brick by brick to his estates so they can be preserved.
That is just one element, Hewitt covers the first Ikea and the worlds largest B&Q as the middle class China learns how to DIY in their new homes. It is a society that now has aspirations, has an exploding middle class that expects all the trappings with their status such as consumer rights, an open media and quality educatoin. Meanwhile the country folk, struggling for healthcare and support on their farms, are emigrating to the cities in their millions, where they face exploitation and a lack of rights from a social system struggling to keep up with the pace of change around it.
The young people are more self aware and self interested than the previous generation, they are pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable to their elders further and further, religion is starting to blossom, in some cases offering crucial social support, don’t mention falun gong though. As he works through China’s society and culture and how it is changing, it seems, to me anyway, that something of a realisation slowly dawns (it’s a big book, there is no rush).
It seems as if the Government, cautiously taking it’s feet of the brakes, is now struggling to regain control. Time and again the Government relaxes the laws or rules, but then tries to reign them in, or control them in a different way. What it seems like it hasn’t realised is that it is seriously going to struggle to have a free market, with free enterprise, without a free society. To me, by rolling down the path it has taken, the leadership in China must adapt or potentially face a long slow decline into irrelevance. Whether this is right or not is neither here nor there, interestingly there are a few times in the book where people comment that it was better under the Chairman, and certainly, not everyone in China is on this express to riches and for the tales of success, there are many, many tales of struggles.
Getting Rich First has given me an interesting glimpse into what is an incredible moment in history, as China rushes with abandonment into a new stage of it’s life, trying to charge through decades of change in a number of years, and although it offers a snapshot, the problem with this book is this: It was published in 2007, and is probably, already completely out of date.
(blog review here)
It’s not just the figures, Hewitt includes a wealth of personal stories in this, some poignant, some successful, many less so. What they do is paint a picture of a Government, and society, struggling to keep up with the pace of change it is feverishly trying to expedite. For a society as ancient and venerable as the Chinese, there is a seeming lack of concern about knocking down old buildings, juxtaposed with their thousands of years of heritage. As home ownership becomes more important, more space is needed to build houses, stretching further from the centre of the cities and razing to the ground old properties (many of which are no longer suitable for inhabiting, but are still called home to a few). Indeed, Jeffrey Wong, in one of my favourite parts, started buying old buildings and relocating them brick by brick to his estates so they can be preserved.
That is just one element, Hewitt covers the first Ikea and the worlds largest B&Q as the middle class China learns how to DIY in their new homes. It is a society that now has aspirations, has an exploding middle class that expects all the trappings with their status such as consumer rights, an open media and quality educatoin. Meanwhile the country folk, struggling for healthcare and support on their farms, are emigrating to the cities in their millions, where they face exploitation and a lack of rights from a social system struggling to keep up with the pace of change around it.
The young people are more self aware and self interested than the previous generation, they are pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable to their elders further and further, religion is starting to blossom, in some cases offering crucial social support, don’t mention falun gong though. As he works through China’s society and culture and how it is changing, it seems, to me anyway, that something of a realisation slowly dawns (it’s a big book, there is no rush).
It seems as if the Government, cautiously taking it’s feet of the brakes, is now struggling to regain control. Time and again the Government relaxes the laws or rules, but then tries to reign them in, or control them in a different way. What it seems like it hasn’t realised is that it is seriously going to struggle to have a free market, with free enterprise, without a free society. To me, by rolling down the path it has taken, the leadership in China must adapt or potentially face a long slow decline into irrelevance. Whether this is right or not is neither here nor there, interestingly there are a few times in the book where people comment that it was better under the Chairman, and certainly, not everyone in China is on this express to riches and for the tales of success, there are many, many tales of struggles.
Getting Rich First has given me an interesting glimpse into what is an incredible moment in history, as China rushes with abandonment into a new stage of it’s life, trying to charge through decades of change in a number of years, and although it offers a snapshot, the problem with this book is this: It was published in 2007, and is probably, already completely out of date.
(blog review here)
January 10, 2014
I read this book during the first year I lived in China, in 2008. I bought it in Hong Kong for something like $190 HK dollars, which is about $30 US or so - a real bad deal.
Still, all books there are expensive. I enjoyed reading this one, many times on Chinese buses, and I thought the author did a good job talking about the different people.
I especially liked how he discussed the various taxi drivers and how they often came from the same hometowns and would call each other on their cell phones for directions - city's changes so much and so fast they don't know where to go.
It was a pretty good book and worth a read if you're interested in China.
Still, all books there are expensive. I enjoyed reading this one, many times on Chinese buses, and I thought the author did a good job talking about the different people.
I especially liked how he discussed the various taxi drivers and how they often came from the same hometowns and would call each other on their cell phones for directions - city's changes so much and so fast they don't know where to go.
It was a pretty good book and worth a read if you're interested in China.
August 20, 2019
Exactly as the blurb describes. This book is a very readable explanation of the most recent huge transformation of China.
August 19, 2014
China: Getting Rich First is an excellent social history from the 1980's until 2008, its copyright date. Duncan Hewitt of the BBC travels all over China tracing the evolution from communism to capitalism socially, not politically. He tells stories of indivual Chinese to help the reader understand the impact of the incredibly fast transition. With more freedom has come less free health care and education and housing. Billions of people migrate to cities to work leaving their children behind in their village of origin. Hewitt explores the sexual revolution, religions re-emergence, and the incredible yearn for wealth. It seems from a country of sameness has emerged great diversity and personal expression of uniqueness. The social divide between the urban and the rural and the migrant reveals how much less a socialist country China is now. Every Westerner should read this book. So many of China's social problems are reflected in our own society, especially in America.
October 20, 2013
Though this book may have information that isn't up to date anymore, it gives you invaluable insights into the lives of modern Chinese, where money is supreme and people are adjusting to changing (worsening) morals in society.
It is written by a BBC correspondent and is well researched and resourceful with numerous interviews with the locals.
As someone who grew up in Hong Kong (just before and after the city was returned to China), there were still many things that I did not understand about mainland China because of the political divide and cultural discrepancies. In order to fully comprehend this emerging global power, it would be useful to survey the country's recent history.
It is written by a BBC correspondent and is well researched and resourceful with numerous interviews with the locals.
As someone who grew up in Hong Kong (just before and after the city was returned to China), there were still many things that I did not understand about mainland China because of the political divide and cultural discrepancies. In order to fully comprehend this emerging global power, it would be useful to survey the country's recent history.
June 17, 2013
A fantastic overview of life in modern China up to around 2006-07 or so, but it's still just that - an overview. Written by a BBC journalist, it still has tell-tale traces of China as seen from the outside rather than completely objectively or from the inside, but that might just be par for the course given the subject matter.
October 16, 2016
The title says it all. I thought this book detailed every nook and cranny of Chinese society that many Americans, Europeans, etc. are too ignorant to study to their detriment.
My main takeaway: China's developed from a communist dictatorship into an economic powerhouse by not necessarily doing away with the two in totality, but combining capitalism - not socialism - with communism.
My main takeaway: China's developed from a communist dictatorship into an economic powerhouse by not necessarily doing away with the two in totality, but combining capitalism - not socialism - with communism.
August 2, 2008
An overview of life in modern China. Easy, informative read from a former BBC correspondent who has lived and worked in Beijing and Shanghai for many years.
February 8, 2014
No index; over-use of general phrases like 'in recent years'; extensive end-notes.
February 12, 2016
An excellent account of the societal issues and challenges in China today.
April 1, 2017
long but interesting
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews