Risky Business in Rising China

by Mark Atkeson

Tech-savvy "bandit" entrepreneurs testing repressive government policies. Corrupt, old-guard executives lining pockets. Highly educated young engineers and managers forging cutting-edge companies. Nouveau riche hiding assets. "Risky Business in Rising China" is an American businessman's in-the-trenches chronicle of three decades working in multiple industries in China's new economy — and a candid account of the conflicting forces that have transformed the world's most-populous nation into an economic (and military) superpower, yet may doom it to spectacular decline without drastic change in central-government direction. MARK ATKESON took an early career gamble by eschewing work with Corporate America, unlike his fellow Yale engineering grads in 1986, and landing a job in backward but slowly modernizing an impoverished nation then vastly overshadowed by Japan's dominance in world trade. Fluent in Chinese, he went on to run companies in fields ranging from aircraft maintenance to electric-vehicle production, mobile internet to venture capital, while he and his wife raised their four children in China. Now living in California, he continues consulting for China-related businesses.

257 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2023

Reviews

[C. Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among westerners with knowledge of China, there are doers and talkers, and those who talk tend to drown out others with more practical experience. We hear rarely from those who have worked in the trenches successfully managing important Chinese business and cross-border joint ventures. Mark is a doer. He offers offers keen and practical insights from the perspective of the rare western manager and entrepreneur who learned to adapt and thrive in China and along the way earn the respect of his Chinese colleagues as well as his western employers, investors and colleagues.