I’ve been traveling around this week giving talks on my new Oxford University Press book, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, and one of the works I took along to divert me on planes and trains (I started it while flying to D.C. on Monday and finished it on an Amtrak ride to New Jersey on Wednesday) was an excellent new Princeton University Press publication by Berkeley economist Pranab Bardhan. As soon as I dipped into Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India, one thing that struck me was how much it had in common with the book I've been promoting--and not just because each is a general interest work by an academic that has been issued by a press linked to a prestigious university.
Here's a rundown of some similarities between the two works:
1) Each is short. (Mine clocks in at 164 pages; Bardhan's at 172.)
2) Each strives to dispel some common misconceptions about China, including the notion that it will inevitably democratize as its economy grows.
3) Each has only a small number of footnotes and tends to steer clear of specialized terminology.
4) Each stresses the dangers of making firm predictions about what is to come, yet ends with a forward-looking chapter. The last one in Bardhan's book is called “Looking to the Future: Through the Lens of Political Economy,” while the “The Future" is the title of the last one in mine.
All this could suggest that I would have trouble enjoying Bardhan’s book because of a sense that it was in direct competition with mine. This was not, however, the case. I was able to take pleasure in reading and learning from it without any niggling worry that people who buy it won’t be tempted to purchase China in the 21st Century. This is because, for all the similarities between the two books, there are a pair of crucial differences between them.
The first relates to topical focus. Bardhan is an economist, so not surprisingly he is primarily concerned with economic issues. Those are not the sole focus of my book, which explores topics ranging from Confucian thought to consumer culture, from generation gaps to the World Expo. Bardhan has valuable things to say about non-economic topics (politics, the environment, etc.), but his attention remains fixed throughout on the dynamics of development.
The second contrast between our books is even more important: his is equally concerned with two different countries, whereas I concentrate on just one (albeit with a variety of brief forays into comparison). Bardhan makes his interest in a pair of countries clear in his book’s title and subtitle: Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India. (One thing I like about that title is that it is refreshingly free of any allusion to a totemic animal. No cliched “dragon” vs. “elephant” word play for him.)
Bardhan writes with remarkable clarity about complex issues, such as the widely varying ways that corruption can affect the economy, and the positive as well as negative legacy of the Maoist era for China in terms of its recent trajectory. (For example, he stresses the importance of the upsurge of literacy during the pre-Reform era, which meant that a relatively well-educated pool of workers were ready to contribute to the country's take-off after Deng Xiaoping came to power.) He also shows some welcome stylistic flair, quoting poetry to good effect in one section (how often do economists do that?) and slipping a lovely bit of alliteration into the title of a chapter: “Infrastructure: The Dazzling Difference.”
One thing that I was relieved to discover when I reached the end of the book was that, while I certainly gained new insights into many specific issues from reading it, nothing I came across in Awakening Giants caused me to wish I could go back and alter fundamentally anything about my own brief treatment of China-India comparisons in China in the 21st Century. This is hardly surprising, though, since one person I read to prepare to write that part of the book was Bardhan--a fact I acknowledge by listing one of his recent articles (that is available free online) in my book's “further readings” section.
There’s a final contrast between our two books worth noting. Only mine was written in a question-and-answer format, a hallmark of the “What Everyone Needs to Know” series of which it is part. And yet, when I got to the end of Awakening Giants, I definitely felt that most of the questions I had about the Chinese and Indian political economies (and I suspect these are ones that other Americans interested in Asia are likely to have as well) had been answered very effectively.
Source: http://newscri.be/link/1089853
Here's a rundown of some similarities between the two works:
1) Each is short. (Mine clocks in at 164 pages; Bardhan's at 172.)
2) Each strives to dispel some common misconceptions about China, including the notion that it will inevitably democratize as its economy grows.
3) Each has only a small number of footnotes and tends to steer clear of specialized terminology.
4) Each stresses the dangers of making firm predictions about what is to come, yet ends with a forward-looking chapter. The last one in Bardhan's book is called “Looking to the Future: Through the Lens of Political Economy,” while the “The Future" is the title of the last one in mine.
All this could suggest that I would have trouble enjoying Bardhan’s book because of a sense that it was in direct competition with mine. This was not, however, the case. I was able to take pleasure in reading and learning from it without any niggling worry that people who buy it won’t be tempted to purchase China in the 21st Century. This is because, for all the similarities between the two books, there are a pair of crucial differences between them.
The first relates to topical focus. Bardhan is an economist, so not surprisingly he is primarily concerned with economic issues. Those are not the sole focus of my book, which explores topics ranging from Confucian thought to consumer culture, from generation gaps to the World Expo. Bardhan has valuable things to say about non-economic topics (politics, the environment, etc.), but his attention remains fixed throughout on the dynamics of development.
The second contrast between our books is even more important: his is equally concerned with two different countries, whereas I concentrate on just one (albeit with a variety of brief forays into comparison). Bardhan makes his interest in a pair of countries clear in his book’s title and subtitle: Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India. (One thing I like about that title is that it is refreshingly free of any allusion to a totemic animal. No cliched “dragon” vs. “elephant” word play for him.)
Bardhan writes with remarkable clarity about complex issues, such as the widely varying ways that corruption can affect the economy, and the positive as well as negative legacy of the Maoist era for China in terms of its recent trajectory. (For example, he stresses the importance of the upsurge of literacy during the pre-Reform era, which meant that a relatively well-educated pool of workers were ready to contribute to the country's take-off after Deng Xiaoping came to power.) He also shows some welcome stylistic flair, quoting poetry to good effect in one section (how often do economists do that?) and slipping a lovely bit of alliteration into the title of a chapter: “Infrastructure: The Dazzling Difference.”
One thing that I was relieved to discover when I reached the end of the book was that, while I certainly gained new insights into many specific issues from reading it, nothing I came across in Awakening Giants caused me to wish I could go back and alter fundamentally anything about my own brief treatment of China-India comparisons in China in the 21st Century. This is hardly surprising, though, since one person I read to prepare to write that part of the book was Bardhan--a fact I acknowledge by listing one of his recent articles (that is available free online) in my book's “further readings” section.
Source: http://newscri.be/link/1089853
