Made in China: When U.S.-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade

A combination of diplomatic imperatives, Chinese development policies, and American capitalists’ hunger for cheap labor jump-started China’s transformation into an economic superpower in the late 20th century, according to this probing debut chronicle. Ingleson, a history professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, links the growth of trade between the U.S. and China to dovetailing shifts in each country’s political economy. In China, she contends, the radical Gang of Four were defeated in 1978 by pragmatists, led by Deng Xiaoping, who built on earlier reform initiatives to shift the economy away from communist autocracy toward market-oriented capitalism, financed by exports. In the U.S., business leaders’ view of China changed “from a place to sell U.S. goods to a site instead of cheap labor.” Though writing in dryly academic prose, Ingleson nicely meshes large-scale economic analysis with fine-grained accounts of how businesspeople warily navigated the new world of U.S.-China trade (fashion entrepreneur Veronica Yhap pioneered Chinese apparel imports by sparking a 1970s rage for chic Mao jackets and worker suits), often to the detriment of local economies. (One chapter recounts the doomed battle of Chillicothe, Mo.’s glove factories to win trade quotas limiting the cheap Chinese imports that eventually bankrupted them.) The result is a revealing overview of a critical sea change in the world economy. Photos. (Mar.)