The China Price: The True Cost Of Chinese Competitive Advantage

A landmark eyewitness exposé of how China's factory economy competes for Western business by selling out its workers, its environment, and its future. In The China Price, acclaimed Financial Times correspondent Alex Harney uncovers the truth about how China is able to offer such low prices to the rest of the world. What she has discovered is a brutal, Hobbesian world in which intense pricing pressure from Western companies combines with ubiquitous corruption and a lack of transparency to exact an unseen and unconscionable toll in human misery and environmental damage.

Harney shows that what happens in China is often inevitable due to the country's lack of transparency, institutionalized graft, and limited legal recourse for workers. She reveals the widespread use of false factories to conceal illegal operations and highlights that many Western companies accept plausible deniability to enjoy low prices. The book also discusses the rapid change in China, driven by domestic disillusionment with factory life, worsening pollution, and grassroots activism, signaling profound challenges ahead for China and the global economy.