"China Shakes the World"

[fiefoe]

James Kynge 写得很跳跃，前几章从婆媳关系到孙中山的三峡梦到公路赶超美国到三陪到土改到Meissen瓷器来源。

• They were willing to allow such sophistry to flourish because they soon saw that 'red hat' collectives could be the most dynamic job creators and taxpayers in their district... The willingness of local officials to disobey Beijing was therefore a crucial ingredient in the free-market reforms of the 1980s.
• The payments crisis brought on partly by Deng's spending binge in the late 1970s was matched by an urban employment crunch.
• The audacity of the "socks for jets" transaction delighted Beijing, which hailed Mou as one of the country's "Ten Best Private Entrepreneurs."
• ... tribulations of General Joseph Stilwell, or "Vinegar Joe", who has been dispatched by Washington to aid the ailing forces of Chiang Kai-shek (against the Japanese).
• People such as Qiping (from) the concubine tomb village near Beijing are, in some sense, not so much economic migrants as emigres from a cruel past.
• When a market is finally found, aggressive domestic competitors have usually got there first. The fabled billion-person market is frequently reduced to a fraction in the figment of a dream. <> It has been ever thus. Chinese history is much less the history of multiplication than of long division. The experience of having to share scarce resources among so many people...
• In the past, the balance each dynasty strove for was that between food and mouths, but... the crucial equilibrium now is that between people and jobs... That creates an unyielding pressure for growth that influences every economic plan and strategy.
• He perceived that the whole of society was straining at the moorings of enforced egalitarianism.
• Galanz, the microwave maker, decided to expand into air conditioners, and Midea, the air-conditioner maker, was moving into microwaves. Never mind that (both items) were overproduced.
• Chinese corporations .. export as a means of staying afloat at home (to compensate for) the wafer-thin domestic margins.
• Throughout history, the big shifts in the global power balance and in the hierarchy of nations have all been accompanied - or, often, preceded - by a whole set of new price signals... The period from 1873 to 1900 is known as the era of "deflationary boom"..  The opening of the prairies to agriculture (in the US)... caused rural unrest in Europe.