The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us | 
 enlarge | Author: Robyn Meredith
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 2443
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0393331938
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.951
EAN: 9780393331936
ASIN: 0393331938
Publication Date: June 2, 2008
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Product Description
"A comprehensive primer on the development of these Asian tigers."—Noam Lupu, San Francisco Chronicle
The Elephant and the Dragon is the essential guide to understanding how India and China are reshaping our world. With labor now unbound from geographic borders, we're seeing startling shifts in how—and where—nearly everything we buy is made. In a compelling mix of history and on-the-ground reporting, veteran journalist Robyn Meredith untangles the complex web of business and politics, as well as environmental and cultural issues that entwine India, China, and the West. She also outlines how Americans—business leaders, workers, politicians, even parents—can understand the vast changes coming and thrive in this new age.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 the elephant & the dragon July 22, 2008
Excellent book!! If you are interested in the upcoming and important economies of the world this is a must read. This is a very readable and entertaining book.
scary July 9, 2008
Well, Robyn lays it all out here. Kids say in school. This is good reading and very pertinent information for people in the work force today. Things have changed in the last seven years. Stay informed, this is a good informative book.
Damon
 Very Interesting View From 30,000 Feet June 4, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I very much enjoyed the opening chapters as Meredith spewed out statistics and opinions and history of how China and India have come to be in their current economic situations. This was very well written and extremely easy to read as well as quite engaging. Reading these two chapters is worth the trip to the library for this book as they provide a fascinating expose of why socialistic ideals, while bred from trying to do well, provide the opposite in practice. Capitalism and democracy when put in place with the least amount of lawmaker interference will bring out the best in people and the land on which they are living.
However, in the chapters explaining the outsourcing of service jobs to India and factory jobs to China, I began to look at the footnotes. Many footnotes reference the same work over and over and over again. This isn't necessarily bad, but the viewpoint from the author is somewhat simplified and with only a limited number of sources, there isn't the in depth look at the statistics or the line of reasoning. For instance, on page 85, the author mentions that economists are locked in arguments about how vast the changes will be due to "offshoring". However, Meredith only quotes one source and therefore one side of the argument and the source is one that has been quoted previously in the same debate. This is common throughout the book.
The chapter on "disassembly lines" was very good as a beginning look at Supply Chain economics. But again, it didn't go far enough with comparisons on how long things take to manufacture from start to finish as compared to before China and after China. Maybe I'm too tough on comparisons, but in telling this type of information, I like to see more of both sides of the equation.
The last chapter is interesting and brings up some discussion points, but some of it is pretty far out there. Going on and on about how China affects our housing pricing due to their holding of dollars is quite a stretch. After all, they were still holding dollars as interest rates went up and then down. There are many external factors that are closer to the United States and have a more immediate impact. And again, she is rambling in opinion without any reference points. Complaining that China is over-polluting and should be using Ethanol while pointing out that China has a water/irrigation problem and is gobbling up farmland for manufacturing just doesn't make any sense - going to Ethanol will only make the food supply more scarce.
I could go on chapter by chapter, but you get my point. There isn't enough of the thoughtful interplay that I would expect in this type of book. Where are both sides of the story? Where is the depth? In Chapter Three about China financing its growth of infrastructure, Meredith begins to scratch the surface about the banking problems that might arise from the demands of the Chinese government to hand out loans to whomever they (the government) see fit. This would have been a wonderful place to explore the differences of how various governments finance infrastructure and to do a compare and contrast with China, India and maybe the U.S. or Great Britain.
I guess I'm looking for the next step. This book is a very good start of this topic, but it doesn't go far enough for me. I wanted more of the details. Maybe that isn't what the author was attempting. I did notice that much of the reference material was on-line website information or magazine articles. Some were direct interviews and that always leaves me wondering. Meredith is a good magazine article writer and wrote this book in a similar manner. The subject material is such a current interest; I hope that someone writes something with more substance. If it's out there, I'd appreciate a comment with some other readings that have more depth.
 "tectonic economics" April 18, 2008
A Starbucks at the Great Wall? Stephen Spielberg hired to help with the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in China when a million performers welcome the world? Did India really move from 300,000 cell phones in 1996 to 150 million by 2007, and are they now purchasing seven million "mobiles" a month? Yes, yes, and yes. Welcome to the "tectonic economics" of China and India that have "caused the entire earth's economic and political landscape to shift before our eyes." In this book written for a general readership, Robyn Meredith blends history, economic analysis, numerous anecdotes, and a blizzard of statistics to explain how this happened and what it means.
After twenty-seven ruinous years under Mao that killed 40 million people and decimated not only the economy but science, art, education, and religion, in 1978 Deng Xiaoping took over in China. No, there would not be political freedoms, but yes, there would be radical economic reforms. The results have been startling. Take infrastructure. In 1989 China had a minuscule 168 miles of freeways; by 2010 it will have 40,000 miles. Or exports. By 2004 China was the largest exporter in the world, exporting "in a single day more than it sold abroad during the entire year of 1978." Picture China as the brawny manufacturing giant.
Think of India as the brains of the information and service industries-- call answering, computer programming, research and development, data entry, biotech, etc. They have far more workers who are far better educated and who will work for far less at a higher skill level than almost any country. And there's a long and very competitive line in India for these jobs: "When EDS began hiring for its call center in the Mindspace complex, 6,000 people applied for just 110 jobs with a starting salary of $250 a month, or $3,000 a year, for college graduates." No wonder the United States will lose about 3.3 million jobs to "off-shoring" by the year 2010.
But not all that glitters is gold, Meredith points out. While these rising economic tides have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, in India, for example, 81% of the population still lives on $2 a day or less. 93% don't graduate from high school. And is it really such a great thing that a billion Chinese consumers are "a tabula rasa for western advertisers?" The economic earthquakes have also caused severe cultural dislocations of gender roles, mass migrations of illiterate peasants to the cities in search of higher-paying jobs, income stratification that is increasing the gap between rich and poor, intellectual property theft, horrendous environmental degradation, and unsustainable consumption of natural resources like iron ore and oil. But this is a one way street and there's no turning back, not for India, not for China, and not for the shell-shocked United States. Stay tuned, and in the mean time you might want to upgrade your job skills.
Excellent read for every American March 27, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Robyn Meredith does an excellent job of analyzing the rise of China and India as world economic powers and the effect this is having - and will continue to have - on America. She puts this rise in the historical perspective of silk and spices a few centuries ago with the "American" 20th century of technical innovation. The work is very readable, making a lot of what we hear discussed on the news about free trade and job losses more understandable. The final chapter reassures us that the American "can-do" spirit - along with a renewed emphasis on education, basic research, and innovation - can be rekindled to pull America out of its doldrums. Hopefully my own work on how to make education a national - and parental - priority will add to this excellent analysis.
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