State capitalism. Socialism with Chinese characteristics. A socialist market economy. There have been numerous descriptions of the Chinese economy. However, none seems to capture the predatory, at times surreal, nature of the economy of the world’s most populous nation – nor the often bruising and mind-bending experience of doing business with the Middle Kingdom.

Rules and agreements mean little. Markets are distorted, statistics fabricated, foreign industrial secrets and technology systematically stolen. Companies and entrepreneurs, at home and abroad, are bullied – often with the collusion of the victims themselves. The Party is in every boardroom and lab, with businesses thriving or dying at its will.

All this is part of realising President Xi Jinping’s ambition of China becoming the world’s pre-eminent economic, technological and military power.

China’s economy has been presented as a technocratic model to be emulated, but also as an enormous Ponzi-style bubble which defies economic gravity. To admirers it has pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty (a claim fundamental to Party legitimacy); to critics the achievements are exaggerated, the costs enormous, and a reckoning inevitable. The vicissitudes of ‘reform and opening’ are extensively studied, but poorly understood. ‘Reform and opening’ was never a coherent policy. The survival of the Communist Party was always fundamental.

This book is the story of China’s vampire economy, and the single-minded effort by the Party to bend economics and business to its own will and ambition. It is a predator. Businesses thrive or die at its will. In many ways contemporary China now shares the characteristics of the pre-war Nazi economy. 

This book will:

• Examine the myths upon which so many studies of the Chinese economy are built

• Look at the messy reality behind ‘reform and opening’

• Describe how the will of the Party has been and remains the driving force

• Describe the essentially predatory (and often surreal) nature of the Chinese economy and the wider goal of global economic and military leadership

Each chapter will be a snapshot of different aspects of economy/business.