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The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, The Factory, and The Future of The World

The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, The Factory, and The Future of The World, St. Martin's Press, March 2020, looks at one of the biggest questions facing China: will it successfully make the transition from its decades-old role as "factory to the world," reliant on cheap, low-skilled workers, and become a superpower with its own globally competitive companies and leading-edge technology. The book is told through the eyes of China's hundreds of millions of internal migrants that make up as much as one-third of the workforce. Now as many are replaced by robots, the government has a plan. It wants workers to reinvent themselves as entrepreneurs as well as find work in modern service industries, with many of them returning to villages. They are supposed to become part of an ever larger middle class, and help renew economic growth. As China becomes a society of haves and have-nots controlled by an increasingly authoritarian government, this book shows how unlikely that outcome is.