China's Offshore Investments:
A Network Approach
By Charles Dumas and Diana Choyleva, Profile Books, May 2006, 160 pages
Compared with the huge amount of investment China receives from abroad, China's outbound direct investment has not drawn nearly enough attention from researchers so far. Perhaps motivated by this scholarly neglect, China's Offshore Investments has as its focus the direct investment coming from, not going into, China in the past quarter-century. The book's research is a significant contribution to the body of knowledge on outbound direct investment (ODI). Like so many other things in China, the country's outbound FDI exhibits "special characteristics" - in timing, pace and geographical distribution - that sharply contrast with mainstream theories on FDI. The author uses ideas from business analysis to develop a network model of FDI specifically for analysing China's foreign investment patterns, as well as worldwide patterns in investment in the era of globalization.

Oracle Bones: A Journey Between
China's Past and Present
by Peter Hessler, HarperCollins, April 25, 2006, 512 pages
Beijing-based journalist Peter Hessler has now lived in China for a decade since first arriving in the Sichuan town of Fuling as a Peace Corps volunteer, the subject of his first book, River Town. In this effort, he broadly explores modern China and its relationship with the West, as well as with its own past. After describing the excavation of an ancient walled city at Anyang, Hessler sketches a portrait of the country as it is now, focusing on an eclectic group of people, including a Uighur money changer who operates on the fringe of legality and exploits a loophole to make his way to America, former students from Fuling now working in the eastern boomtowns, a film director and a scholar who was destroyed by the Cultural Revolution. He weaves these vignettes in with examinations of history - particularly the 3,500-year-old oracle bones of the Shang Dynasty - and the Chinese struggle to redefine national identity. The book is at heart an outsider's earnest attempt to make sense of a bewilderingly complex and diverse country.