Acclaimed business journalist Studwell takes to task the predictions that China will become an economic juggernaut on the world stage in the 21st century--and instead foresees an economic crisis.

Hong Kong and Southeast Asia are home to five hundred million people, yet their economies are dominated by only fifty families whose interests range from banking to real estate, shipping to sugar, gambling to lumber. At their peak, eight of the world s two dozen richest men were Southeast Asian, but their names would not be familiar to most regular readers of "The Wall Street Journal." A complex mythology surrounds these billionaires, but in "Asian Godfathers," Joe Studwell finds that the facts are even more remarkable than the myths. Studwell has spent fifteen years as a reporter in the...

Named by Bill Gates as one of his Top 5 Books of the Year
An "Economist" Best Book of the Year
In the 1980s and 1990s many in the West came to believe in the myth of an East-Asian economic miracle, with countries seen as not just development prodigies but as a unified bloc, culturally and economically similar, and inexorably on the rise. In "How Asia Works," Joe Studwell distills extensive research into the economics of nine countriesJapan, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Chinainto an accessible, readable narrative that debunks Western...