Bulls in the China Shop: And Other Sino-American Business Encounters

Looking back after the June 1989 government crackdown at Tiananmen Square, Stross (a professor of international business) examines the 1979-89 decade of U.S.-Chinese business relations. Stross describes how the lure of the world’s largest market drew U.S. businesses to China, while many Chinese saw their country’s salvation in Western technology, capital, and management techniques. Stross points out that Americans ignored China’s incapacity for commerce and the Chinese failed to realize how subversive the ideological roots of Western business and management would be for the Chinese system. Moreover, both Americans and Chinese sought to do business by different rules and customs. Stross’s accounts of the experiences of Americans trying to do business in China ably underscores the difficulties, misunderstandings, and disappointments these unreal expectations produced. (Amazon.com)