Following the success of their best-selling One Hour China Book, Peking University Professors Jonathan Woetzel and Jeffrey Towson are back to explain the rise of Chinese consumers.In this one hour "speed read", the authors argue:1) China is now the world's most complicated consumer market. The complexity of Chinese consumers is increasing exponentially with wealth.2) The importance of China's rising consumers is matched only by the brutality of the fight for them. The competition is brutal and there are far more corpses than winners. 3) The State still ultimately creates most of the winners.The authors explain all this through five short stories. They detail the successes and failures of Carlsberg, KFC, Christie's, the NBA and others in hyper-competition consumer China. Ultimately, this book is about how Chinese consumers are finally becoming wealthy and how Western companies are finally learning to live with communism. A few take-aways from the book:- Young Chinese are the big-spending, emotional Chinese consumers the entire world has been waiting for.- State-Owned Enterprises can compete and win in purely commercial industries.- Food scandals are good in the long-term for KFC and McDonalds.- Elderly Chinese are not the attractive demographic everyone thinks they are.- The NBA China doesn't need another Yao Ming. - You can win big if you get to Chinese consumers AND the government. State capitalism can be exceptionally profitable.- Western China, the country's big backyard, is the last great battleground for multinationals. And Carlsberg beer is the first clear winner.- Almost any Chinese consumer can act affluent some of the time. Something that is particularly confusing for Christie's and Sotheby's.- One consumer demographic everyone should care about is China's working moms.

"One hour with this book will make you an expert on business in China." - Dick Gephardt, Majority-Minority Leader, U.S. House of Representatives, 1989-2002 "Without question, the best 60 minutes you will spend on China." - Jonathan Anderson, Emerging Markets Advisors This is the China book for everyone - whether an expert or novice. It can be read in an hour and gives you most of what you need to know about China business today - and its increasing impact on the rest of the world. This "speed-read" book is the distilled knowledge of two Peking University business professors with over 30 years of experience on the ground in China and the emerging markets. According to authors Jeffrey Towson and Jonathan Woetzel, "if we had the undivided attention of someone from Ohio, Brighton or Lima for just one hour, this little book is what we would say." Author Jonathan Woetzel is a senior partner of McKinsey & Company. He opened McKinsey's Shanghai location in 1995 and has been resident since then. He currently the global leader of its Cities Special Initiative and the Asia-based Director of the McKinsey Global Institute. He has led many of the Firm's most significant projects in China including the first major international listing of a Chinese company and the development of the economic plans for the cities of Shanghai, Wuhan, Shenzhen, Xian and Harbin among others. He co-chairs the Urban China Initiative along with Tsinghua University and Columbia University to catalyze the next stage of China's urbanization. Author Jeffrey Towson is a private equity investor, professor and best-selling author. His area of expertise is developing economy investing and cross-border strategies - primarily US-China deals in healthcare and consumer products. He was previously Head of Direct Investments for Middle East North Africa and Asia Pacific for Prince Alwaleed, nicknamed by Time magazine the "Arabian Warren Buffett" and arguably the world's first private global investor.

From one of the most successful journalist/businessmen ever to do business inChina comes a blueprint for succeeding in the worlds fastest-growing consumermarket.

"As a twenty-two-year-old exchange student at Nanjing University in 1981, John Pomfret was one of the first American students to be admitted to China after the Communist Revolution of 1949. Living in a cramped dorm room, Pomfret was exposed to a country few outsiders had ever experienced, one fresh from the twin tragedies of Mao's rule - the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution." "Twenty years after first leaving China, Pomfret returned to the university for a class reunion. Once again, he immersed himself in the lives of his classmates, especially the one woman and four men whose stories make up Chinese Lessons, an intimate and revealing portrait of the Chinese people." "Beginning with Pomfret's first day in China, Chinese Lessons takes us back to the often torturous paths that brought together the Nanjing University History Class of 1982. We learn that Old Wu's father was killed during the Cultural Revolution for the crime of being an intellectual; Book Idiot Zhou labored in the fields for years rather than agree to a Party-arranged marriage; Little Guan was forced to publicly denounce and humiliate her father." "As we follow Pomfret's classmates from childhood to university and on to adulthood, we see the effect that the country's transition from near-feudal communism to First World capitalism has had on his classmates. This riveting portrait of the Chinese people will not only change your understanding of China but also challenge your perception of the way fate can shape the course of nations as surely as it has the extraordinary lives of these five classmates."--BOOK JACKET.

Following the success of their best-selling One Hour China Books, Peking University Professors Jonathan Woetzel and Jeffrey Towson are back with a collection of essays on China business ¿ and to detail four things everyone is getting wrong about China.In this one hour "speed read", the authors present +30 essays that make four main contrarian points:1) China needs smarter, not faster growth.2) Yes, Chinese consumers are rising. But they are changing even faster. And they are disrupting everything.3) China can innovate big time.4) At home and abroad, Chinese companies can beat you fair and square.

"In vivid detail... examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties."--The Boston Globe "Not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China's past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history."--LA Review of Books An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.

The rollicking story of a young man who goes to China with the misguided notion that he will help bring the Chines into the modern world, only to be schooled by the most resourceful and creative operators he would ever meet.