America's Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony
Channel: New America
Date: 13/03/2008

With the United States and China, who will rule whom? That's the central question of In the Jaws of the Dragon by Tokyo-based journalist and writer Eamonn Fingleton. His own answer is sobering. As American leaders fixate on the Middle East, China quietly consolidates both its geostrategic vision and its economic and military power. What is at stake is far more important than manufacturing jobs or the transparency of Sovereign Wealth Funds. It is a matter of which nation will control the global system America built, and the nations integrated into that system.

Fingleton has lived and worked in Asia since the mid 1980s, and he has covered international economics and business since the 1970s. The American ruling elite, he says, does not understand China, nor the nature of the Chinese government. Most members of the elite continue to believe - a la Tom Friedman - that liberal trade will liberalize China. But Fingleton writes that what is taking place is the exact opposite. "Globalization" has merely given Beijing the financial and institutional tools to get what it wants from America, when it wants.

Over the years, Fingleton has repeatedly proven a prescient observer of international economic trends. In the late 1980s he predicted the crash of the Japanese banking system and stock market. In the late 1990s he predicted the crash of the high-technology boom, and the subsequent shift of real power back to those who control production and supply. His articles have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Harvard Business Review, among others. In the Jaws of the Dragon is Fingleton's fourth major book on trans-Pacific industrial and trading relationships.