Silicon Dragon

Over on Big Think I’ve reviewed Silicon Dragon, a book about China’s wave of high-tech entrepreneurs (see Mitt Romney’s Afraid of China. Should You Be?).  It’s written by my old colleague Rebecca Fannin, who has spent much of the last decade looking at private equity in the Far East.

There is a “Huns are coming” school of thought about China and India and Asia’s other fast-emerging economies. Reading about China in particular makes one think that the hordes are once again sweeping across the plains and soon will sack our economy (Clyde Prestowitz’s Three Billion Capitalists is a recent example). We seem faced with an amorphous seething mass of ‘them.’

Rebecca’s book Silicon Dragon: How China Is Winning the Tech Race, shows us who ‘them’ are. She takes us inside 11 different Chinese high-tech firms and introduces us to the entrepreneurs in all their brilliance – and bumbling. There’s at least as much bumbling as brilliance amongst the entrepreneurs we meet.

For more on her book and for some links to other views of it, see my review on Big Think.