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  • The China Price

  • The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage
  • Written by: Alexandra Harney
  • Narrated by: Karen White
  • Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
  • 5.0 out of 5 stars (1 rating)

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The China Price

Written by: Alexandra Harney
Narrated by: Karen White
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Publisher's Summary

To write The China Price, Alexandra Harney has penetrated further and deeper into China's enormous ecosystem of export-oriented industry than any outsider before her. She uncovers the truth about how China is able to offer such amazingly low prices to the rest of the world. What she has discovered is a brutal, Hobbesian world in which intense pricing pressure from Western companies combines with ubiquitous corruption and a lack of transparency to exact an unseen and unconscionable toll in human misery and environmental damage. The recent scandals about Chinese-made toys, tires, and toothpaste drive home a central tenet of this book: What happens in Chinese factories affects all of us, everywhere.

In a country with almost no transparency, where graft is institutionalized and workers have little recourse to the rule of law, incentives to lie about business practices vastly outweigh incentives to tell the truth. Harney reveals that despite a decade of monitoring factories, outsiders all too often have no idea of the conditions under which goods from China are made. She exposes the widespread practice of using a dummy or model factory as a company's false window out to the world, concealing a vast number of illegal factories operating completely off the books.

Some Western companies are better than others about sniffing out such deception, but too many are perfectly happy to embrace plausible deniability as long as the prices remain so low. And in the Gold Rush atmosphere that has infected the country, in which everyone is clamoring to get rich and corruption is rampant, it's almost impossible for the Chinese government's own underfunded regulatory mechanisms to do much good at all. But perhaps the most important revelation in The China Price is how fast change is coming, one way or another.

©2008 Alexandra Harney (P)2008 Tantor

What the critics say

"A vivid portrait of factory life in the country that sells consumer goods for the lowest price possible." (Kirkus Reviews)
"Packed with facts, figures, and sympathetic portraits of Chinese workers and managers, Harney's is a perceptive take on the world's workshop." (Publishers Weekly)

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