In the Times Literary Supplement, Rosemary Righter reviews three recent books about China’s economic reforms: The Writing on the Wall
China is now on the brink of becoming the world’s leading trading nation. Its relentless hunt for raw materials moves oil and commodity markets and increasingly roils international diplomacy, because Beijing has no compunction about doing business with repugnant but resource-rich regimes. It is also running giant surpluses, including a trillion-dollar stack of US Treasury bonds, which it is only now beginning to invest more aggressively. It is not yet true, as it has long been of the United States, that if China were to sneeze, the world would catch pneumonia: to put things in perspective, the China analyst Arthur R. Kroeber recently pointed out that the assets under management of a single American mutual fund, Fidelity, are equal to China’s entire foreign exchange stockpile. But China’s potential capacity to upset the international applecart already exercises financial analysts and other crystal ball gazers. The most cursory survey of the torrent of recent China books – typical is Ted Fishman’s China Inc.
