China's Change injects timely, original ideas into the world's most important, if confused, debate over how to manage the twin challenges of anaemic economic growth and accelerating global disruption. Change is the cry from the US to Europe, Asia to Australasia. The snag is the West has no playbook to help. China however, to regain control of its future, has regularly reinvented itself by understanding change's nature through traditional philosophy.
This book argues it is time to "Look at China" but stresses China's approach to managing change only supplies the process not individual policies: the how not the what. Policies have to be created locally. In managing change, traditional thought is China's X-Factor, the key to China's record-breaking economic transformation. To grasp this, China's Change provides an understanding of China's past, present and future through its philosophy, history, economics, business, politics, prospects and impact in a way that no other book has done.
Two big global questions are answered. Can other countries, firms and individuals find paths out of their dim twilight by adapting China's change process? Can China continue to create one-third of world growth, more than the US, EU and Japan combined, to help cure the last decade's global economic malaise?
China's roadmap for change enables anyone to navigate growing global disruption. Ironically China's process is built on such ignored-in-the-West ideas as long-term thinking, clear priorities, gradualism and non-ideological pragmatism that earlier powered two centuries of Western economic dominance. If the West and rest of Asia learn from China to manage change, the next global surprise could be another turning of the tables. There is no end to history, only more turns of the wheel: for now China's Change is again the Greatest Show on Earth.