Time Magazine has a less-than-glowing review of John and Doris Naisbitt’sChina’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society:
It’s bad timing that the glowing, indeed craven, China’s Megatrends appears just as the world is rethinking China’s rise. Google’s threat to pull out of China, friction over the Dalai Lama, problematic international access to China’s domestic market, the country’s flawed regulatory environment, its voracious hunger for resources, its geopolitical maneuvers in Africa and Asia: all have lent urgency to worries about the country’s ascendancy. But not for John and Doris Naisbitt. To them, China is an unalloyed success, one whose virtues are too little understood. Take Internet censorship: “Actually, most of the concerns about the Internet are in Westerners’ heads.”
…The Naisbitts posit eight future developments for China; none are insightful. There’s “Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones,” which meant something when Deng Xiaoping uttered this maxim of pragmatic, step-by-step reform, but has become little more than a cliché three decades on. “Emancipation of the Mind” also looks tired after an entire generation of Chinese has grown up with an openness unimaginable to their parents.
As ideas, “Artistic and Intellectual Ferment” and “Joining the World” are hardly the product of much brainstorming and betray the Naisbitts’ tone-deafness. Do we really believe that what the Naisbitts call “Chinese country music” will soon become a “moneymaking machine” simply because one peasant group’s original composition, Song of Sanitation Workers got some favorable notice in the provincial press?
Read more about the Naisbitts and their book via CDT.
