The Coming China Wars

Peter Navarro is a business professor at the University of California, describes an emerging power beleaguered by both internal and external threats-if the Japanese don't get them, AIDS and SARS will. This will reassure those readers who are increasingly convinced that the Chinese will eat us for lunch. However, as Navarro points out, China's human and natural resources make her a formidable global player-and her native, amoral ruthlessness suggests she will win.
Still, as a nation undergoing its Industrial Revolution in the Information Age, China has her problems transitioning from Communism to capitalist imperialism, as seems to be her goal. True, government and industry have forged strong bonds (that allow them to exploit slave labor and ignore environmental and economic constraints that hamper other nations), but like any modern nation, China is paying the price of competing in a global economy: pollution; rapacious private medical care expenses; an aging, under-pensioned population; international tensions; and a large and disgruntled peasant working class. Navarro, whose inclination to breathless hyperbole makes even a chapter on dam construction exciting, tellingly devotes 10 chapters to China's problems and one to their solution-essentially tired policy prescriptions (wean the U.S. from oil dependence and cheap Chinese imports). This informative book will teach readers to understand the dragon, just not how to vanquish it.