Skip to main content

The Elephant and the Dragon by Robyn Meredith

A survey of the development and modernization of China and India. Written by a reporter for Forbes with a disappointingly light grasp of economics and trade. The numbers, data and statistics will be interesting, even shocking, to anyone new to reading about these emerging economies. Unfortunately, if you're already conversant in what's going on over there, the book may read like an unstructured collection of obligatory factoids.

The Elephant and the Dragonwould make a solid "first book" to a reader new to the issues on China and India, but I'm casting about for a book on the topic that is more predictive and insightful. Does anyone have any good suggestions?

The author argues that the US has a lot to fear from China or India. I'm sure the same fear-based mentality raged in England in the 1800s when the US passed England as the world's largest economy. Last I checked, however, England is still there and wealthier than ever.

Further, Meredith uses so many examples of "on the one hand/on the other hand" thinking that I walked away from the book wondering which side of this issue she really stood on.

That said, I did learn a few things from this book, in particular how ignorant and incompetent Mao, Gandhi and Nehru were on economic issues and how their ideologies handicapped their countries for decades.



Addendum (8/10/08): I'm going to add to this post a reading list of potentially interesting books for further reading. In general, I'll select the most interesting sounding titles listed in the bibliography (if there is one) or other notable book titles mentioned or drawn from by the author the text itself.

In the future, I'll do this for any book that provides titles that would be of interest to readers looking to pursue any of the book's subjects on a deeper level. As always, if you have feedback or suggestions for titles, you can leave a comment on this or any post. Also, you can always reach me privately here at dan1529[at]yahoo[dot]com.

Reading list for The Elephant and the Dragon:
One quick comment: Most of these books are likely much more interesting and influential than this book itself!

1) India Unbound Gurcharan Das
2) Making Globalization Work Joseph Stiglitz
3) From Third World to First : The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 Lee Kuan Yew
4) Billions: Selling to the New Chinese Consumer Tom Doctoroff
5) One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China James McGregor
6) The Fords: An American Epic Peter Collier and David Horowitz
Labels:

More Posts

Stress Without Distress by Hans Selye

A short book distilling Hans Selye's groundbreaking technical work The Stress of Life  into practical principles for handling daily life. Articulates a basic philosophy that can be boiled down to "earn thy neighbor's love." Selye calls this "altruistic egotism" and argues that satisfaction in life can be achieved by seeking genuinely satisfying work, earning the goodwill and gratitude of others through that work, and by living with a philosophy of gratitude. Not his finest book, but it is interesting and useful to hear the values and prescriptive statements of one of biology's most eminent scientists. The ideas in this book are not original--the author candidly admits as much--but offer helpful guideposts for how to live. Notes: 1) The first chapter is essentially a layperson's summary of Selye's main work The Stress of Life , defining key terms, what he means (in biological terms) when he talks about stress, describing the evolution of the stres
Read more

The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. Francis Golffing)

Of the three essays of The Genealogy of Morals  I recommend the first two. Skim the third. Collectively, they are extremely useful reading for citizens of the West to see clearly the oligarchic power dynamics under which we live. Show me a modern Western nation-state where there isn't an increasing concentration of power among the elites--and a reduction in freedom for everyone else. You can't find one. Today we live in an increasingly neo-feudal system, where elites control more and more of the wealth, the actions, even the  thoughts  of the masses. Perhaps we should see the rare flowerings of genuine democratic freedom (6th century BC Athens, Republic-era Rome, and possibly pre-1913 USA ) for what they really are: extreme outliers, quickly replaced with tyranny. The first essay inverts the entire debate about morality, as Nietzsche nukes centuries of philosophical ethics by simply saying the powerful simply do what they do , and thus those things are good by definition. La
Read more

The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 by Peter Brown

Late Antiquity is a rich, messy and complicated era of history, with periods of both decline and mini-renaissances of Roman culture and power, along with a period of astounding growth and dispersion of Christianity. And it was an era of extremely complex geopolitical engagements across three separate continents, as the Roman Empire's power center shifted from Rome to Constantinople. There's a  lot  that went on in this era, and this book will help you get your arms around it. And Christianity didn't just grow during this period, it was a tremendous driver of political and cultural change. It changed everything--and to be fair, really destabilized and even wrecked a lot of the existing cultural foundation underlying Mediterranean civilization. But then, paradoxically, the Christian church later provided the support structure to help Rome (temporarily) recover from extreme security problems and near collapse in the mid-third century. But that recovery was an all-too-brief min
Read more