Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire, and Betrayal

by Ethan Gutmann

Arriving in Beijing in 1998 along with other Americans searching for the riches of the new China, Ethan Gutmann rapidly made his way into the expatriate community of American entrepreneurs. For them, Beijing was an Open City inside a controlled world. Entering this well-catered equivalent of a corporate boot camp, Gutmann was indoctrinated in the creed that China's growing strength presented untapped opportunities for profit and expansion. American entrepreneurs might say -- and even believe -- that they were bringing freedom to China, but they were actually engaged in what Gutmann calls "climbing the Gold Mountain." Over the next three years, as Gutmann worked his way into comfortable positions at a Chinese television documentary company and a public affairs firm conducting U.S. politicians on carefully choreographed tours of the New China, he became an insider. What Gutmann discovered in the company meetings, cocktail parties, and after-hours expat haunts made him uneasy. Motorola reps bragged of routinely bribing Chinese officials for market access; Asia Global Crossing executives burned through company expense accounts while racking up massive losses for the corporation; and PR consultants provided svelte Mongolian prostitutes and five-star hotel suites for home office delegations. In Beijing's expat fast lane, success was measured not only by market share, but also by the ability to pay off favors by building hot-swappable research centers for the PLA and lobbying for Chinese interests in Washington. Treating the New China as a combination of El Dorado and Lotus Land, American businessmen allowed themselves to be seduced by a hallucinatory Orientalist dream world of easy money, moral complicity and exotic sex. Gutmann too felt the seductive powers of the Beijing Boot Camp and at one level "Losing the New China" is a trip log of an unexpected personal journey. But above all, this book is a carefully documented report on a commercial world without moral landmarks or boundaries, where actions have unintended consequences. Writing from the ground zero of his daily experience, Gutmann shows how massive American investment generated prosperity -- but also a feverish new nationalism which surged into China's universities, the dot.coms, and the entrepreneurial centers. Beginning with the riots over the 1999 Belgrade embassy bombing, he witnessed an eruption of anti-Americanism and a spurning of democracy even as U.S. technology and communication companies executed wholesale transfer of America's most sophisticated technologies to the Chinese market. With the full cooperation of companies such as Cisco, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo!, Chinese authorities used American technology to monitor, sanitize, and ultimately isolate the Chinese web, creating the world's greatest Big Brother Internet. After three feverish years, Ethan Gutmann returned to the U.S. hardened by what he had experienced in the New China. But he brought something of value with him -— an intimate insider's story of American business in 21st-century Beijing. Filled with character and event, "Losing the New China" tells a fascinating story of strangers in a strange land. Readers will come away from this book understanding how and why U.S. corporations helped to replace the Goddess of Democracy that once stood in Tiananmen Square with the Gods of Mammon and Mars that dominate China today.

Genres: China, Business

250 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2003

Reviews

[Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating peek behind the curtain of the American business community's activities in Beijing during the 1990s and early 2000s. An honest, and at times shocking, record of the work and lifestyle of American businesspeople, and of the many different hats that they had to wear to deal with the contradictions of operating in the New China.

The book discusses the many ways in which American corporations adapted, compromised and ultimately yielded to pressures to conform to the Chinese system and to the Party's will.

Particularly interesting is the chapter on the early days of the Great Firewall, which describes the complicity of American companies in developing and establishing systems for state surveillance, and their role in legitimising the permanent role of censorship in China.

If state capitalism is 'socialism with Chinese characteristics,' then these are 'American companies taking on Chinese characteristics'. An interesting and well-written depiction of Sino-American business relations, and much more.

[Sav · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has to be one of the best and most important books I have ever read. A reviewer on Amazon calls it a sad book for a sad China but the real horror here for me is that foreign companies are complicit in assisting the CCP with building the GFW. I was already cynical about corporations. It is one thing to know most if not all don’t care about anything but the bottom line but quite another to see such a concrete example of this callous behavior.

China isn’t becoming more like the US, but rather the opposite. I’m sad for us both.

There is so much more in this book. It is a must read for anyone interested in China or business. I look forward to Gutmann's new book on Falun Gong.