Is China Buying the World?
by Peter Nolan
Polity Press
This excellent book aims to demolish the idea - widely believed in the West - that, with its record level of foreign exchange reserves, China is 'buying the world'.
The author, Peter Nolan, is professor of Chinese Development at Cambridge University. He 'knows more about Chinese companies and their international competition than anyone else on earth, including in China', says the Financial Times on the book's jacket. A statement that is flattering, if hard to verify.
'China has not bought the world and shows little sign of doing so in the near future,' Nolan writes. 'Their presence in high-income countries is negligible. This is a remarkable situation for a country that is the world's largest exporter and its second largest economy and manufacturer. In other words, 'we' are inside 'them' but 'they' are not inside 'us'.'
His argument is that while China has been extraordinarily open to investment by multinational firms from the west, it has not been reciprocal.
'In the high technology and branded goods sector for the middle classes of developing countries and in the supply chain that surrounds these firms, large Chinese companies have made negligible inroads into the dominant position built up over many decades and now held in developing countries by multinationals from high-income countries,' he writes.
These multinationals have billions of dollars in sales revenue every year in China and source billions more in goods produced there for export.