By Michael A. Lev
Special to The Morning Call
''China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World'' by Ted C. Fishman (Scribner, $26, 342 pp.)
Here's a scene from the dazzling Chinese economy I recently witnessed: In the darkened boardroom of a corporate high-rise in Beijing, an executive from a California-based venture-capital firm blows away his audience of American visitors with a slick presentation on new investments in China.
Not one is a factory that makes cheap plastic toys. That's the old China. These are all post-industrial moneymakers: One is a company that operates video monitors displaying advertising in office-tower elevators. Another distributes radio programming via wireless Internet. These sophisticated start-ups, the executive asserts with nonchalance, will go public and return something like ''10x,'' meaning 10 times the initial investment.
China, the most-populous nation on Earth, is now an economic force to be reckoned with, one whose destiny — it has become popular to predict — will be to challenge America for global economic supremacy.
It is undoubtedly the most exciting business story of the decade, if not the most important geopolitical story, and it is the territory Ted C. Fishman examines in ''China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World.''
It is astounding to realize that a country that 25 years ago was still reliant on collectivized farming and had just opened itself to outsiders is now factory to the world and potentially the single biggest market in the world for everything from semiconductors to airplanes. China is poised to take control of the global textile industry. It has ambitions to become one of the world's biggest manufacturers of automobiles.
Given China's population of 1.3 billion people, comprising a cheap, infinite workforce; its re-emergent entrepreneurial culture; and an authoritarian government that can manage industrial policy without the distractions of public opinion or politicians running for re-election, it's hard not to get excited about China's future — or fear it.
By one estimate, China's economy — which today ranks as about the seventh-largest — could be 75 percent bigger than America's by the year 2050.
''China still only makes one-twentieth of everything produced in the world, but on the world stage it plays the role of a new factory in an old industrial town,'' Fishman writes. ''It can spend, it can bully, it can hire and dictate wages, it can throw old-line competitors out of work. It changes the way everyone does business.''
Fishman, a Chicago-based freelance writer who was once a floor trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and Esquire, among other publications, obviously is on to something.
One of the biggest American political stories of the past two years has been the economic rise of China and the concern that its low-wage factories are stealing U.S. jobs. This has led to accusations that China's government is playing a game of unfair trade by manipulating its currency — keeping the value of the yuan fixed and therefore artificially cheap so it can underprice its goods and thereby run factories across the United States out of business.
As a correspondent who has lived in Beijing for the past five years, I found ''China, Inc.'' to be a valuable account of how China got where it is and where it's going. But it isn't perfect, largely because it reads a bit more like a general survey or textbook than the gripping tale that China's rise represents.
That's because the book isn't personality driven. By not delving more into the stories of China's people, the book underplays a critical point. China is a country divided into haves and have-nots ruled by a heartless, paranoid regime that crushes all dissent. While millions in the cities are benefiting from economic development, hundreds of millions more are missing out on the boom because they remain trapped in the countryside or have lost their jobs in obsolete, communist-era factories.
The farmers feel they are overtaxed. The unemployed are bitter. Riots have become commonplace. Many factory workers have been mistreated.
These dynamics are crucial to understand because China's future is not yet secure. For the moment, with China's economy charging ahead at 10 percent annual growth, more people probably are happy — or at least patient — than are unhappy, but any unforeseen calamity that derails progress — whether a banking meltdown or regional currency crisis — could lead to chaos.
There are critical lessons to be learned from ''China, Inc.'' Among them is Fishman's recognition of ''the China price,'' a term that he says ''has … become interchangeable with lowest price possible.'' The ability of the Chinese, with their huge domestic market and low wage structure, to produce goods at unbeatable prices is not just a competitive advantage — it's a revolutionary phenomenon.
''While all eyes turn to the so-called clash of civilizations between Islam and the West,'' Fishman warns, ''in the long run China will have the most profound impact on the world.''
Michael A. Lev is a writer for The Chicago Tribune, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.