We All Need To Understand China Better: Our Financial Futures Depend On It!

This month, I have added two new books as my Books Of The Month. Both books are focused on China and the economic and financial dynamics that are shaping its rise to global economic leadership in the 21st century.

Virtually all influential scholars, economists and financial market observers acknowledge that China will play a major role in the future of global economics and finance. However, the implications of China's role in the future for the United States depends on not only China's actions, but our reactions to their actions.

Regardless of how the future dynamics actually play out, it is virtually a given that those dynamics will have a profound effect on the economic and financial well-being of the United States and its citizens.

So, we all need to understand China better because our future depends on it.

Here are some key insights from the two Books Of The Month on China:

SuperFusion - Introduction

"This is a book about how two countries became one economy. It is about how the fusion of the two most powerful economies in the world today is upending conventional wisdom and reshaping the global system. In the wake of the financial crisis that erupted in 2008, the fusion of China and the United States has become even more vital to the prosperity not just of hundreds of millions of Americans and more than a billion Chinese but for everyone everywhere. As the world emerges from the crisis and turns to the future, how China and the United States manage their relationship will determine whether the coming decades hold increased global prosperity or fractious, unstable growth with sharp divides between winners and losers."

When China Rules The World - Reader Comment:

As Martin Jacques argues effectively in this book, the West has misjudged China because of a bedrock assumption that modern financial and political systems have to follow some basic principles of openness, rule of law and democracy. That is the paradigm that favored the United States, and paved the way for its world domination, from 1945 onward. But China's remarkable progress is not following the script, and is challenging Western assumptions.

With clear and compelling writing, Jacques makes the case that when China is the dominant power, it will make the rules. It may even create a new international paradigm, one that is just as hard for Americans to foresee as it was for the British a century ago to foresee their own decline, and as it was for the Romans, long before that.

"The West has, for the most part, become imprisoned within its own assumptions," Jacques writes. "Progress is invariably defined in terms of degrees of Westernization, with the consequence that the West must always occupy the summit of human development."

I have started a specific section on this blog titled, "Understanding China". Here are some links to articles and videos that will help you to understand China better:

How China and America Became One Economy: What It Means to Global Prosperity
Financial Times - China
The Coming Economic Crisis In China
China's Around-the-Clock Auto Factories Still Can't Meet Demand
The 2010 Global Risks Report
Young and Restless In China
ChinaStakes.com
China Consumer Spending Power
Google Tried To Get Support After China Cyber Attack
Unleashing The Chinese Consumer

Stay tuned..................