China is the next USA. Minus the democracy, of course. And the property rights. And the compunctions about slave labor. What we were to the world at the beginning of the last century–an energetic, expansive, economically irresistible force, the next big thing–1.3 billion Chinese are now. The mainland miracle inspires enormous trepidation and enthusiastic trade. We embrace its promise of low-cost plenty even as we’re sent reeling by it. Consider the phenomenon of Wal-Mart providing Chinese-made bargains to the same people it’s helped throw out of work.
Ted Fishman: China, Inc. is about how the enormous changes in China are changing the rest of the world. It starts with the largest migration in human history–which is 300 million people picking themselves off the farm and walking into an urbanized, industrialized economy–and how that is changing the way Americans, Europeans, Japanese, and most other people in the world shop, work, act as citizens, and raise our children.
TA: Can’t we control the process, the way we would with any contractor?
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TA: The Chinese are famous for pirating all kinds of intellectual property from technologically advanced societies like ours.
TF: I absolutely do. The big mistake Americans make when we talk about this issue is to say, “Oh, Microsoft’s losing money, or Hollywood’s losing money.” It’s very hard to get people sympathetic about Microsoft or Hollywood. They just sound like crybabies, and they’re so wealthy anyway. But the real victims of the current regime are not just Microsoft and Hollywood. It’s any company in the United States that has to pay full boat for technology and still compete against a Chinese company that doesn’t pay for it.
TA: So they have the same sort of regional/federal tension that we have.
TF: No, I don’t think you can expect that. The business of America is business, right? But right now there’s this big conflict between large corporations in the United States–the Fortune 500–and all the businesses that are under them that supply them with what they use to make stuff. The vast bulk of American enterprise is in medium and small businesses. They can’t get up and move to China as easily as these rich companies. So there’s a big split in the business agenda. It’s the large corporations that think of the world as their community, and the smaller ones that think of their community as their community.
