Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom

----By Carl Crow, China Economic Review Publishing, 281 pages

This is a reprint of Carl Crow's 1940 book about the business lessons of the "Old China Hands", foreigners who sought their fortunes on the "China Coast", between the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and the Japanese invasion of 1937. Crow, who during that period was a successful American newspaperman and advertising executive in Shanghai, spoke fluent Chinese, unlike the majority of his foreign contemporaries, and was a sharp cultural observer. In the 1980s, "as China began to open up to the world and foreign business again, some remembered Carl while a new generation born long after his death have rediscovered him and found in the process that China is all too often a market of eternal truths and constants," writes Paul French, author of Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand, in the foreword. Available at www.chinaeconomicreview.com/store

Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China

By Duncan Hewitt, Chatto and Windus, May 10, 2007, 320 pages

Hewitt, a Shanghai-based Newsweek correspondent and author, tells the story of the rapid changes in China's economy and society since from the reforms of the 1980s to the present through the lives of people who have lived through some extraordinary events. The book's subjects reflect the dramatic, near instant inequality between those who prospered as a result of economic opening and those who were left behind: "the peasant revolutionary turned lifestyle guru, the former Shaolin monk working on a Shanghai building site, the once-conservative father running a gay hotline and the teenagers who just want to dress up as their favourite Japanese cartoon characters". The title refers to Deng Xiaoping's famous declaration that in order for China to develop it would have to "let some of the people get rich first".