From Publishers Weekly
Since China opened its doors to the West, American companies, spurred by visions of a market of one billion consumers, have invested in joint enterprises with the Chinese. Profound question marks hang over their success. Accounts of some of these ventures have already appeared in academic works and specialist magazines, and journalist Browning here combines information gleaned from already-published material with original interviews that she conducted in China and the U.S., providing a distillation of case histories that are well known or characteristic: Armand Hammer's Ping Shuo coal mine, AMC's Beijing Jeep plant, Gillette's Shenmei blade factory, etc. She conveys the frustrations and pitfalls of doing business in China and usefully places these within the historical perspective of the country's conflicting impulses toward tradition and reform. When straying from case histories into general cultural matters, Browning makes the occasional slip: Beijing doesn't have a Xinhua university, for example. Overall, though, the slim volume is easily accessible and provides many thought-provoking cautionary tales.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
These books are aimed at business people working in East Asia. Browning, a former UPI financial reporter, explores how American business projects have fared in China. She is sometimes shaky on details about China, but her book makes good reading when she discusses the problems at Occidental Petroleum's Antibao coal mine and the Jeep production line in Beijing. She finds repeated evidence that, in spite of a Chinese reputation for industriousness, "low productivity, lax discipline, and failed safety standards plague joint ventures in . . . China." In Japan, most foreign firms do not want to start plants but instead are lookng to import products to Japanese consumers. Fields, who grew up in Japan and has worked in advertising there since 1965, writes about marketing to Japanese consumers with the knowledge and skill displayed in his earlier study, From Bonsais to Levis ( LJ 2/1/84). He continues his argument that Japan's younger consumers are becoming like those of the United States and Western Europe. Fields's style is sometimes disjointed; however, if the reader is patient, Fields is both entertaining and informative. In one section he compares American and Japanese baseball to show how different Japanese consumer psychology is from that of North Americans. He also is eloquent about how Japanese consumers fail to challenge the "institutional price fixing . . . that keeps many products more expensive than in other advanced economies . . . . " Both books have something worthwhile to say on the subject of American business in East Asia.
- David D. Buck, Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- David D. Buck, Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
