The Transpacific Experiment
How China and California Collaborate and Compete for Our Future
by Matt Sheehan
ebook
1 of 1 copy available
Tensions between the world’s superpowers are mounting in Washington, D.C., and Beijing. Yet, the People's Republic of China and the state of California have built deep and interdependent socioeconomic exchanges that reverberate across the globe, making California and China a microcosm of the most important international relationship of the twenty–first century.
In The Transpacific Experiment, journalist and China analyst Matt Sheehan chronicles the real people who are making these connections. Sheehan tells the story of a Southern Californian mayor who believes a Chinese electric bus factory will save his town from meth labs and skinheads. He follows a Chinese AI researcher who leaves Google to compete with his former employer from behind the Great Firewall. Sheehan joins a tour bus of wealthy Chinese families shopping for homes in the Bay Area, revealing disgruntled neighbors and raising important questions about California’s own narratives around immigration and the American Dream.
Sheehan’s on–the–ground reporting reveals movie sets in the “Hollywood of China,” Chinese–funded housing projects in San Francisco, Chinese immigrants who support Donald Trump, and more. Each of these stories lays bare the new reality of twenty–first–century superpowers: the closer they get to one another, the more personal their frictions become.
“Cuts right to the heart of the relationship between Silicon Valley and China: the tangled history, the current tensions, and the uncertain future . . . a must–read.”—Kai–Fu Lee, former president of Google China and founder of Sinovation Ventures
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
August 13, 2019 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781640092150
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781640092150
- File size: 5750 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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June 15, 2019
The United States and China are rivals on many fronts--and in California, "the world's two most powerful countries are meeting, cooperating, and competing." Journalist Sheehan, a Californian who logged more than five years working in China, turns in a suggestive portrait of a place in which Chinese money has been responsible for no small amount of economic activity: the San Francisco Shipyards, say, "the city's largest housing and retail development in decades," and Hollywood, where many of today's blockbusters have Chinese backing. In exchange, California-based companies such as Apple and Google have provided a lucrative outlet for Chinese manufacture while introducing new technologies into the Chinese market. In all, writes the author, China has reversed the position it held a century ago, a poor country whose chief export was labor. It has done so in at least some respects by shaping an image of California to suit itself: "blue skies, top universities, innovative technology, and global blockbusters." The transformation has left China less dependent on outside markets--where Chinese graduate students in American universities once remained here, by one measure, most now return home with their advanced learning and skills--but has not substantially diminished the relationship between what Sheehan characterizes as America's most liberal state and a stubbornly totalitarian government. Politics enters the picture along several fronts. Sheehan notes, for one thing, that whereas for generations California's Chinese-descended population has been reliably Democratic, new immigrants, scornful of their predecessors, are often volubly conservative. Chinese companies have made missteps in California, notably in Hollywood, and American firms have made missteps in China, as when eBay opened the door for the emergence of Jack Ma's giant Alibaba firm and was forced to retreat from the Chinese market, "the first time a Chinese internet company had gone head-to-head with its American rival and won." Though the relationship has lately been troubled, Sheehan foresees continued interactions and mutual influence in decades to come. Timely reading in an era of looming trade wars and the decline of American economic supremacy.COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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