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1 - Just How Capitalist Is China?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

Yasheng Huang
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Summary

In 2004, Lenovo, a computer maker based in China, acquired the manufacturing division of IBM. This event, coming off the heels of the news that China had contributed more than the United States to global GDP growth, took the world by storm. Richard McGregor (2004), a reporter for the Financial Times, captured a widespread sentiment when he wrote that the purchase was “a symbol of a new economic era, of how a fast-rising China had suddenly grown powerful enough to subsume an iconic American brand.” Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (2005) had not been alarmed with Japanese acquisitions in the 1990s but he was about Chinese investments. He believed that the Chinese corporate acquisitions posed a great threat to the United States. There are even those who hailed the Lenovo acquisition as heralding a new world order with China at its center (Shenkar 2006).

Business-school academics are particularly enamored with Lenovo. For them, Lenovo is proof positive of China's fertile entrepreneurial environment and rising competitiveness. In his book, The Chinese Century, Oded Shenkar, a professor at Ohio State University, rejects the notion that China lacks its own homegrown corporate giants. Lenovo, he argues, is just as homegrown as the best of the Indian corporations, such as Wipro or Infosys (Shenkar 2005). Lenovo is also featured prominently in Made in China: What Western Managers Can Learn from Trailblazing Chinese Entrepreneurs, a book by Donald Sull, a business professor at INSEAD (Sull 2005).

Type
Chapter
Information
Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics
Entrepreneurship and the State
, pp. 1 - 49
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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  • Just How Capitalist Is China?
  • Yasheng Huang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Book: Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics
  • Online publication: 06 July 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511754210.003
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  • Just How Capitalist Is China?
  • Yasheng Huang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Book: Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics
  • Online publication: 06 July 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511754210.003
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Just How Capitalist Is China?
  • Yasheng Huang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Book: Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics
  • Online publication: 06 July 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511754210.003
Available formats
×