Fifteen years ago, this book chronicled the successes, foibles, and missteps on the first US auto manufacturers to startup in modern China. This during the time when Premier Deng was just starting to modernize China's industry in the early 80s after Mao's death. Written by Jim Mann, this was his first book as a LA Times bureau chief stationed in Beijing for 3 years. He finishes the book just after Tiananmen incident in 1989, when the new acquirer Chrysler buys AMC from Renault and shuts the Chinese JV down.The book does an excellent job at depicting the cat and mouse game where the Americans were trying for easy money just being assembler of parts kits from Detroit. The Chinese wanted newer technology models, to upgrade the Soviet installed manufacturing of legacy Jeeps that was sold during the 50s. They also wanted design capability and technology transfer assistance to build their own manufacturing infrastructure. The unspoken terms that China's leaders wanted: to be able to design and manufacture the Jeep themselves. Not content to merely be an assembler, they had self-reliance goals to provide the PLArmy's with a new four door, soft-top Jeep, now and for years to come. This takes a huge amount of resources and money, which both China and AMC did not have. China didn't have lots of hard currency and AMC was simply undercapitalized and did not have a parent with deep pockets.
Mann's story has 25 chapters and 6 pages of notes, most references are from American and Chinese newspapers. His tale of woe is interesting, fast paced, and reads like a novel. Of course most of the dialog is from AMC's point of view, but he attempts to decipher the Chinese point of view too. But like most things PRChinese, it was day late and a dollar short. His book also includes a useable 13-page index. I did not read the B-school version of this book published 9 years later, but read this book from a local public library. Mann's conclusion is that American business will have an expensive, long, arduous, and bittersweet experience in establishing a manufacturing beachhead in China. His last remark is: "If there ever is truly a huge, unified China market, it will likely be captured not by the foreigners who have been pursuing this commercial dream for more than a century, but first of all by the Chinese themselves."
One thing that Mann does not do is set the larger stage on what other company's investments are going on during the Deng's Reform and Opening (79-89), for both American and Chinese. He does do a very brief intro on p114 on Overseas Ethnic Chinese (OEChinese), but did not describe any OEChinese investments into mainland China. I think this is a serious omission as it would have been very interesting to see a comparison and contrast between management styles and preferential treatment given to Chinese re-patriots. Most early repats established JVs in the Shenzhen and Xiamen SEZs in the 80s. As a group, OEChinese are a tremendous US$3Trillion economic force as described in Chapter 11 of Rohwer's book "Asia Rising," (1995, 0-684-82548-1).
OEChinese is also covered in a Singapore Mgmt U's, G.T. Haley's etal "New Asian Emperors," (1998, 0-7506-4130-4) another B-school reader. On p58-9, there is a listing of 37 important OEChinese families. There are over 25 OEChinese Billionaires in ASEAN nations. OEChinese actually did the most investment into China during the first decade of Deng's Opening, especially from Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines. They funneled funds in through Hong Kong. This was described in Haley's book 5 years ago and Rohwer's book 10 years ago but covers the same time frame as Mann's.
Hong Kong-based Rohwer's thesis was that US will benefit from China and Beijing-based Mann's thesis is opposite.
