James M. Fallows

"Americans need not be hostile toward China's rise, but they should be wary about its eventual effects. The United States is the only nation with the scale and power to try to set the terms of its interaction with China rather than just succumb. So starting now, Americans need to consider the economic, environmental, political, and social goals they care about defending as Chinese influence grows." --from "China Makes, the World Takes"Since December 2006, The Atlantic Magazine's James Fallows has been writing some of the most discerning accounts of the economic and political transformation occurring in China. The ten essays collected here cover a wide-range of topics: from visionary tycoons and TV-battling entrepreneurs, to environmental pollution and how China subsidizes our economy. Fallows expertly and lucidly explains the economic, political, social, and cultural forces at work turning China into a world superpower at breakneck speed. This eye-opening and cautionary account is essential reading for all concerned not only with China's but America's future role in the world.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Western world believes that capitalism has won, that our model of individual enterprise and rights has triumphed. But in East Asia a new system has emerged that challenges the economic principles the West extols. In fact, as James Fallows vividly demonstrates, the theories we embrace to explain how nations rise and fall have prevented us from seeing the true nature of this new system and its enormous impact on us. Skillfully blending history with on-the-ground reportage and astute analysis, Fallows reveals how political goals and historical experience have shaped Japan's economic rise and placed it at the heart of the Asian system. He shows how the explosive growth of Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore has been fueled by Japanese investment; why Burma, the Philippines, and Vietnam have been largely isolated from the region's progress; and why Korea, Taiwan, and "Greater China" are the strongest contenders for future economic dominance. Extraordinary in depth and scope, Looking At the Sun provides the first clear picture of the Asian rise and the magnitude of its challenge to the Western world.

"A unique, revelatory portrait of small-town America: the activities, changes, and events that shape this mostly unseen part of our national landscape, and the issues and concerns that matter to the ordinary Americans who make these towns their home. For the last five years, James and Deborah Fallows have been traveling across America in a single-prop airplane, visiting small cities and meeting civic leaders, factory workers, recent immigrants, and young entrepreneurs, seeking to take the pulse and discern the outlook of an America that is unreported and unobserved by the national media. Attending town meetings, breakfasts at local coffee shops, and events at local libraries, they have listened to the challenges and problems that define American lives today. Our Towns is the story of their journey--an account of their visits to twenty-one cities and towns: the individuals they met, the stories they heard, and their portrait of the many different faces of the American future"--

More than two-thirds of the new airports under construction today are being built in China. Chinese airlines expect to triple their fleet size over the next decade and will account for the fastest-growing market for Boeing and Airbus. But the Chinese are determined to be more than customers. In 2011, China announced its Twelfth Five-Year Plan, which included the commitment to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars to jump-start its aerospace industry. Its goal is to produce the Boeings and Airbuses of the future. Toward that end, it acquired two American companies: Cirrus Aviation, maker of the world's most popular small propeller plane, and Teledyne Continental, which produces the engines for Cirrus and other small aircraft. In China Airborne, James Fallows documents, for the first time, the extraordinary scale of this project and explains why it is a crucial test case for China's hopes for modernization and innovation in other industries. He makes clear how it stands to catalyze the nation's hyper-growth and hyper- urbanization, revolutionizing China in ways analogous to the building of America's transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Fallows chronicles life in the city of Xi'an, home to more than 250,000 aerospace engineers and assembly workers, and introduces us to some of the hucksters, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and dreamers who seek to benefit from China's pursuit of aerospace supremacy. He concludes by examining what this latest demonstration of Chinese ambition means for the United States and the rest of the world -- and the right ways to understand it. - Publisher.