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Rating: 
Summary: China belongs to CHINESE, not anyone else.
Review: I think that the author is another american narcissist.
China belongs to CHINESE. How could it let the america lose?
For many Chinese, the American are still one of the barbarians.
The Chinese are too proud to be Americans( actually it is insulting for chinese to be deemed as American.)
The Chinese are Chinese and they can never be anyone else.
Please do not daydream again.
Rating: 
Summary: Beijing Bootcamp
Review: If James Joyce had been fascinated with business rather than literature, and been married to a Chinese scholar rather than Molly, his Ulysses would have been something like 'Losing the New China'. This guy has many hats, and they all sit atop a very clever and knowledgeable mind. Each chapter easily stands alone as a different insider's beautifully crafted, detailed rendering of an american working in Beijing, and the book, rather than the run-of-the-mill plodding polemic, struck me as a brillant collection of "war stories". The single (and there are many) most extraordinary thing about the book is what a good read it is - the title should have been 'Beijing Bootcamp' to more accurate convey the tone of the narrative :-) The world is awash with experts and journalist writing about this mysterious foreign behemouth, this Gold Mountain, the new, shape-shifting CHINA, and most of them dull as dishwater. Gutmann's first-person, New Journalism style will certainly be criticized as "unobjective" by China apologists; I however enjoy hearing a good story teller "tell it like they see it", whether it's William Buckley or Nikita Kruschev. He is every bit the patriotic and dissenting (in the best sense of the word) American that Michael Moore is when he reveals Yahoo and Cisco's "arrangements" to customize their products for a Chinese government determined to build a national intranet for surveillance and propoganda. He is the whistle blower most of us can't risk being when he alerts those running the home office back here that their representatives living in China may be insisting they continue to lose money in China for the simple reason that they want to stay there (the Sex chapter is quite an eye opener!). He is Marco Polo bringing back an important message from a far off land many are eager to understand: watch out - in China they drive a hard bargain, and the American drive to conquer new markets opens us up to $ucker punches in an economic environment where jujitsu easily overwhelms the boxer.
Rating:
Summary: Pessimism with objective characteristics
Review: If you've ever felt twinge of cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile glowing accounts of China's warm and fuzzy opening to the west with news of systematic and pervasive government tortures or crazed mobs burning a U.S. consulate, then you should read this book. In a genre dominated by cautious China hands in the know and anti-China hawks who understand little to nothing about the country, Ethan Gutmann's book is a refreshing change. And given the political reality that is China, another book of this sort is hardly likely to come around soon. Having lived in China for three years working and socializing with key expat and local figures, Gutmann witnessed first-hand both the fascinating attractions and the seedy underbelly of this intriguing country. Few journalists who concentrate on China would dare to make the accusations Gutmann does in this book for fear that their access to the country would forever after be blocked. Beyond the singularity of the book's perspective, Losing the New China is simply a great read. Gutmann's entertaining prose and balanced combination of personal anecdotes with well documented arguments liven up subjects that might otherwise prove tedious, such as descriptions of the state's information firewall and high-tech military technology. Most of the book will appeal to intelligent, educated readers, but some of the technical topics might tempt non-specialists to skim at times. I read the book word for word, though, and always found points of interest regarding subjects that were obscure to me. Make no mistake about it, Losing the New China is a damning account of the Chinese state and U.S. business collusion with this repressive government. While Gutmann does intimate an understanding of the Chinese government's often excessive behaviors, his negativity at times resembles a wholesale condemnation of modern Chinese society. And although I do think this might be the only weakness of the book, sometimes it takes a harsh critic to wake us up to harsh realities. For fear that visas might be denied, academics rarely teach this side of China in the classroom. (I was an East Asian studies major in university myself.) However, to balance the positive images that often come across in the press, I believe this book would make an excellent addition to university courses on contemporary Chinese society.
Rating:
Summary: Not Worth the Time or Money
Review: In his book REDISCOVERING CHINA, Cheng Li quotes a sinologist who said, , "If you visit China for two weeks, you want to write a book; if you stay in China for two months, you want to write an article; if you live in China for two years, you don't want to write anything." Unfortunately, Ethan Gutmann chose not to follow this sage advice and ended up authoring a rambling, self-aggrandizing, anti-China screed.
I have spent a substantial amount of time in China since 2001 and have read numerous non-fiction works about that country. Without a doubt, LOSING THE NEW CHINA is among the worst I have ever seen. Prospective readers should be aware that the publisher, Encounter Books, is backed financially by a number of Conservative organizations, among them the Olin and Koch Foundations. Enough said.
The trouble begins on the opening page of the Preface where Gutmann writes messianically, "I was more motivated by the idea of changing China than by the prospect of profit." The first hundred pages is pure, self-serving public relations from a PR professional, filled with name dropping and insider-status trivia about AmCham, the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing. Skip it and go straight to Chapters 5 and 6 where Gutman switches gears and actually offers some interesting insights into Motorola's successes in China and that government's control of the Internet, aided and abetted by Western networking and security companies.
By this point, however, Gutmann claims to have had a George W. Bush transformational experience in which his enthusiasm for China becomes an insecure loathing, apparently triggered by his realization that nothing he or any other Western businessman does will likely convert China to Western ethics and business values (as if our Enron, Adelphia, Tyco, Global Crossing, Martha Stewart, Jack Grubman hands are so clean). Wonder of wonders, another Westerner learns that 5,000 years of history and culture and 1.3 billion people cannot be changed in a decade!
The last chapter of LOSING THE NEW CHINA is truly bizarre. Gutmann offers a self-pitying wallow into the sex-filled nightlife of Beijing, where any Westerner can find anything he wants, as much as he wants. While describing the sexual escapades of an acquaintance named Rex, Gutmann seems torn between disgust and envy, practically indicting the country's entire female population as empty-headed prostitutes. The author nearly tastes the forbidden fruit himself, having entered his "personal heart of darkness" in the summer of 2001. Oh, the horror! The horror!
Thankfully, Gutmann heroically comes to his senses, returns to his wife in Vermont, and sets out to describe his experience in the evil, godless empire of Communist China. He wears his distaste on his sleeve, foregoing any pretense of objectivity by "cleverly" using the Chinese character for greed ("tan") as a decorative symbol at the beginning of each chapter.
LOSING THE NEW CHINA fails to fulfill the promise implicit in its title, but then, it never really had a chance. The author evidences no sense of Chinese history or China's shamed sense of inferiority to the West, demonstrates no affinity for Chinese culture beyond a condescending appreciation of hutong life (even his dabbles in the Beijing culture scene seem little more than opportunities for personal networking), suggests no familiarity with Chinese life beyond the five square miles around Tiananmen Square, and shows no interest in contact with average Chinese people. The world he describes is an isolated and insular community of expatriates whose contacts are limited to the opportunistic Chinese capitalists most like themselves.
Gutmann concludes that China is not to be trusted, that the Chinese government will do anything to preserve its power and extend its global influence. His China is not a vast commercial market or a "strategic partner," it is a patiently brooding and devious enemy bent on achieving economic and military power. Chinese companies are just tools of the State, willing to lie, cheat, and steal without a second thought. Gutmann laments the behavior of Western companies willing to play by China's rules (or lack thereof) for the sake of making a buck, yet conveniently ignores decades of identical corporate behavior in Mexico, Central and South America, the African continent, and other parts of Southeast Asia. Western companies giving Beijing the tools to police the Internet is inarguably lamentable, but so is marketing arms and munitions to dictators, selling cigarettes to Third World countries, pricing medicines for malaria and AIDS beyond the reach of millions of dying people, and profiting from the sale of a country's own water to its people.
Trust me, this is a book well worth skipping. I only wish I had known better before I started. The same topic - the frustrations of doing business in China's nascent capitalist economy - is covered far, far better and in a much more detailed and entertaining fashion in Tim Clissold's MR. CHINA. I highly recommend it instead.
Rating:
Summary: A dark and shocking wake-up call
Review: Losing The New Chinca: A Story Of American Commerce, Desire And Betrayal is both a personal memoir and testimony to escalating American submission to greed. True stories of bribery, pandering to the interests of Big Brother, and a corporate mentality that brings popular hatred of the U.S. both at home and abroad. A dark and shocking wake-up call to failure of morals and conscience upon the part of American businesses overseas.
Rating: 
Summary: Uncovering the "New China"
Review: There is a conventional wisdom about China's modernization that covers a surprisingly wide range of American opinion. In U.S. business, government, and academic circles, the prevailing view is that China's current direction of market liberalization is the surest way to a more democratic future for the country. Chinese leaders might be nominally Communist, but their decision to open China up to the world will eventually undermine their authority. While challenges to this conventional wisdom have occasionally been broached -- particularly by some U.S. elected officials -- they have never gained the critical mass to effectively change the direction of U.S. policy.
An important reason for this stability in the Sino-American relationship has been due to the efforts of U.S. corporations. American businessmen have been the bedrock of American support for greater openness towards China. When crises between China and the U.S. have erupted - Tiananmen, the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, the spy plane incident - it was usually U.S. corporations that were at the forefront of keeping the relationship stable. As Ethan Gutmann points out in his book "Losing the New China", businesses in China even evolved rote, but effective responses to concerns about China's human rights' problems - the most important of which is that "American business is the long-term catalyst for better human rights in China."
What makes Gutmann's book so effective in exposing the emptiness of this claim is that he was once a true believer in it. Only while living at the margins of the business world in Beijing for two years, and witnessing the cynical uses of this self-serving rhetoric by businesses in China, and how often it was a mere cover for business deals that actually strengthened the Communist party's hold over the country, did he begin to realize "China was moving in a strikingly different direction" than he earlier imagined.
Gutmann's two years in China were eventful. He arrived in time to witness the reaction to the U.S. bombing of China's embassy in Yugoslavia. He made connections easily, dealing with a wide range of people, including what appears to have been a Chinese intelligence agent. He met many of the most important ex-pats in Beijing. As a result, his book has more depth than a reader would expect from the limited time he spent in the country.
The centerpiece of the book is a long chapter on China's policies to control the internet. Gutmann details how the conventional wisdom that Beijing cannot control the forces of online is simply untrue. Not only can the Chinese government maintain a surprisingly effective control over the net, but it is showing an ability to increase that control over time. Search engines, online media sources, and even the computer code used by major multinationals are all manipulated to ensure the internet is sanitized for Chinese web-surfers. That China actively tries to control online content to its citizens is hardly surprising, but what will probably shock most readers is the degree to which U.S. and European corporations are complicit in Beijing's control. Gutmann is no wild-eyed anti-capitalist protestor. He went to China to make a movie and, with any luck, some money; he obviously enjoyed hanging out with businessmen in China - they seem to have been his preferred company; he worked closely with the American Chamber of Commerce for a spell. But even he is shocked at the degree to which Western companies have cooperated with the Chinese government to make the internet a state vehicle for oppression.
Gutmann also touches on other issues: China's military modernization, the surprising fact that almost all U.S. businesses in China lose money, and the way some Westerners sell out to China's government by accepting the party line. These are good write-ups, but with the exception of the chapter on the internet, Gutmann is at his best when talking about the people he meets. A young man who visits Beijing, looking for work, and discovers a sexual paradise, is one example of this. Never that successful with women in the states, the twenty-six year old posted on an internet dating service that he was a foreigner and was immediately deluged with e-mails from Chinese women as far away as Chongking. Thus he began a sexual odyssey - one-night stands, a ménage à trois, and even an orgy followed. In one particularly wild night, he was invited to participate along with three other men and ten Chinese women in group sex. The host was accustomed to such parties. Viagra and condoms were handed out like small treats. Despite all this, the young man remembers his time in Beijing as a period of loneliness.
Gutmann sees the young man's series of sexual escapades as a sort of metaphor for what China does to Americans: it seduces them into letting down their defenses. The young man agrees: "Rex [the young man] points to a Xinhua report from July 2002 that the owners, bouncers and call girls of Sanlitun Bar Street have set up a new branch of the Communist Party. The Party was already letting capitalists in, but the inclusion of sex workers who specifically cater to foreigners raises a question: Why does the Chinese government allow foreigners such freedom? The Chinese conceive of Americans as barbarians - oversexed, easily corrupted fools. Seduction softens them up. Sex is good for business, Rex says, and good for China."
To close followers of China, Gutmann's account will probably hold few surprises. But his book has an entertaining sass to it, including numerous self-deprecating comments, some of which closely border on the self-loathing. He finds it necessary to write about a few near-sexual encounters he had with Chinese women (some of which he initiated), after his wife returned to the states early. How this went down on the home front, he neglects to mention.
Rating:
Summary: A chillling look at the New China
Review: This book is a must read for naive China optimists who think that democracy there is inevitable, and that economic modernization will bring personal freedom. Gutmann went to China as a believer in this position. He thought that simply by being part of the American entrepreneurial community he would be bringing the New China into the community of free nations. His experience there was sobering. He saw that his colleagues among the American business community had no interest in implanting American ideals in China. In fact they routinely betray those ideals, encourage the growth of a virulently anti American nationalism, and compete to see who can transfer the most sensitive military technology to the Peoples' Liberation Army. The chapter on how American high tech companies helped the Chinese authorities create a totalitarian internet is must reading. So is the chapter on how American expatriates experience the sexual underground in the New China. Amazing!
Rating:
Summary: Not a primer but thought provoking and important
Review: This is a seminal book about China with real intellectual rigor. I saw the author speaking on TV and was so taken I had to immediately buy the book. This man is no lightweight, and the book is very artfully written. Was it Marx that said that capitalists would sell the noose to be hung with?....well get a load of Sun, Microsoft, Nortel and Cisco! He loves China but he surely calls a spade a spade!
Rating:
Summary: A real and true story
Review: This is much, much more than a book about doing business in China. "Losing the New China" should be required reading for anyone planning to spend time in China. It shows exactly how Beijing is, as Gutmann says, his generation's "El Dorado," and asks if they should perhaps think about choosing another destination. The story of Gutmann's three years in Beijing is about managing expectations of what goes on in American businesses in China, and I am not just talking about market share and money-I mean what really goes on, every incredible and often deeply disturbing detail. This book is for anyone who thinks of China as the next big thing, the new thing, or just as anything period.
Rating:
Summary: Not a primer but thought provoking and important
Review: This is not a primer for the China novice nor is it meant to be. It is instead a thought-provoking and interesting book, and, in advancing an alternative view of American businesses in China it is an important contribution to the debate on US-China relations. Brilliantly-written it is collection of stories that advance the simple thesis: American business in China is compromising US interests. Gutman is clear about his neo-con political views, clear about his (many) prejudices, and clear about his disaffection with Beijing and with the American business community there. This is not, as other reviewers have labeled it, simple realpolitik propoganda. Having laid out his prejudices for all to see Gutman dives into poking around Beijing, investigating his thesis. Beijing is a complex, sprawling city in an even more complex country. As an ex-China expat I know that just about as well as anybody. Understanding China is like the blind man trying to comprehend the elephant by touch. What most expats lack is the humility to admit how little they understand no matter how much they know. What Gutman does through racy writing and personification of the issue is shine a little light on issues such as US tech companies selling tracking software to China's security services, or pharmaceuticals moving R&D and manufacturing to American's so-called strategic competitor. His conclusion: that American, European and Asian businesses bend over backwards to secure contracts. In the process American firms ignore the formal and informal rules that govern business domestically, while expats ignore the social norms that govern their lives at home. I disagree with many of Gutman's conclusions, but that does not detract from it being a thought-provoking and engrossing piece of investigative writing on an important and always timely subject. Gutman -- starring as the repentant sinner -- believes his moral compass is now sure. It should be up to each individual reader to decide where theirs lie.
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