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Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire, and Betrayal

Ethan Gutmann

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Description for Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire, and Betrayal paperback. Reveals how and why US corporations helped replace the Goddess of Democracy that once stood in Tiananmen Square with the Gods of Mammon and Mars that dominate China. Num Pages: 250 pages. BIC Classification: 1FPC; 1KBB; 3JJPR; JPS; KCZ. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 155 x 228 x 22. Weight in Grams: 420.
Arriving in Beijing in 1998 along with other Americans searching for the riches of the new China, Ethan Gutmann rapidly made his way into the expatriate community of American entrepreneurs. For them, Beijing was an Open City inside a controlled world. Entering this well-catered equivalent of a corporate boot camp, Gutmann was indoctrinated in the creed that China's growing strength presented untapped opportunities for profit and expansion. American entrepreneurs might say -- and even believe -- that they were bringing freedom to China, but they were actually engaged in what Gutmann calls "climbing the Gold Mountain." Over the next three ... Read moreyears, as Gutmann worked his way into comfortable positions at a Chinese television documentary company and a public affairs firm conducting U.S. politicians on carefully choreographed tours of the New China, he became an insider. What Gutmann discovered in the company meetings, cocktail parties, and after-hours expat haunts made him uneasy. Motorola reps bragged of routinely bribing Chinese officials for market access; Asia Global Crossing executives burned through company expense accounts while racking up massive losses for the corporation; and PR consultants provided svelte Mongolian prostitutes and five-star hotel suites for home office delegations. In Beijing's expat fast lane, success was measured not only by market share, but also by the ability to pay off favors by building hot-swappable research centers for the PLA and lobbying for Chinese interests in Washington. Treating the New China as a combination of El Dorado and Lotus Land, American businessmen allowed themselves to be seduced by a hallucinatory Orientalist dream world of easy money, moral complicity and exotic sex. Gutmann too felt the seductive powers of the Beijing Boot Camp and at one level "Losing the New China" is a trip log of an unexpected personal journey. But above all, this book is a carefully documented report on a commercial world without moral landmarks or boundaries, where actions have unintended consequences. Writing from the ground zero of his daily experience, Gutmann shows how massive American investment generated prosperity -- but also a feverish new nationalism which surged into China's universities, the dot.coms, and the entrepreneurial centers. Beginning with the riots over the 1999 Belgrade embassy bombing, he witnessed an eruption of anti-Americanism and a spurning of democracy even as U.S. technology and communication companies executed wholesale transfer of America's most sophisticated technologies to the Chinese market. With the full cooperation of companies such as Cisco, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo!, Chinese authorities used American technology to monitor, sanitize, and ultimately isolate the Chinese web, creating the world's greatest Big Brother Internet. After three feverish years, Ethan Gutmann returned to the U.S. hardened by what he had experienced in the New China. But he brought something of value with him --- an intimate insider's story of American business in 21st-century Beijing. Filled with character and event, "Losing the New China" tells a fascinating story of strangers in a strange land. Readers will come away from this book understanding how and why U.S. corporations helped to replace the Goddess of Democracy that once stood in Tiananmen Square with the Gods of Mammon and Mars that dominate China today. Show Less

Product Details

Format

Paperback

Publication date

2005

Publisher

Encounter Books United States

Number of pages

250

Condition

New

Number of Pages

250

Place of Publication

New York, United States

ISBN

9781594031229

SKU

V9781594031229

Shipping Time

Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days

Ref

99-15

About Ethan Gutmann

Ethan Gutmann

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Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire, and Betrayal

Ethan Gutmann

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